“The magic carpet,” ca. 1860s, via pellethepoet on flickr (under CC license).
The picture was a carte de visite (CdV or visiting card), a type of small photograph patented in Paris in 1854. Exchanging them among family and friends became extremely popular worldwide in the 1860s. Their use was displaced in the 1880s by the larger “cabinet cards” (and later by the home snapshot). Pelle’s notes say this one was purchased from an eBay seller in Paralimni, Cyprus.
Postcard of family in the garden, ca. 1905, via pellethepoet on flickr (under CC license). Pelle’s notes say it was purchased from an eBay seller in Tramore, Waterford, Ireland.
The low-hanging hammock on the left swayed right at the moment the shutter clicked. There are actually two women in the hammock, and there’s a strange blur behind it in the center — probably a child running past. The girl on the grass has tumbled (out of the hammock?), and her legs are up. On the left, the blond girl on the bench has noticed and looks about to laugh.
For a better look, click on the picture — or on “via” above and then on the larger image there.
“Girl playing with Peter Rabbit dolls,” Kingsville, Victoria, 1937, by Gordon Binns, via The Biggest Family Album in Australia, Museums Victoria Collections.
The little girl is Phyllis Binns.
The artist Eppo Doeve painting the Martineau children at “Old Lodge in Terlow (Buckinghamshire),” Great Britain, July 1954, by Willem van de Poll, via Nationaal Archief (Netherlands).
I have not been able to find out anything about these siblings or the home. I cannot find an Old Lodge in Terlow, Buckinghamshire, or indeed a Terlow anywhere in Great Britain. The Martineau family is quite important in Birmingham (an ancestor of the Duchess of Cambridge was a Martineau), but apparently not in Buckinghamshire. Perhaps the photographer made some mistake in his notes.
The son on the right seems to have three golf balls between his fingers. A young amateur champion?
A garden corner of a residence (possibly of the Kitashirakawa family), Tokyo, Japan, 1926-1927, by Roger Dumas, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
This autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (70 965 XS) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
enclos*ure 