[General Charles "Chinese" Gordon]

1880s–1890s

Medium

Collodion print wih brown ink and wash

Dimensions

30.5 × 36.6 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-250648

The man featured in this photocollage is Major-General Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), also known as “Chinese Gordon” for his British military role in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1850 to 1864. Gordon was later sent to Khartoum, Sudan, in 1884 to evacuate loyal soldiers and civilians amidst a revolt led by Muslim leader Muhammad Ahmad. Gordon disobeyed the British government’s command to return home. After taking part in a defense of the city for almost a year, the city fell and Gordon was killed. In this scene General Gordon sits behind a desk in the quiet of his office, perhaps back in England, surrounded by the tools of a military strategies—maps, books, a telescope, and newspapers. Major-General Gordon appears in one other collage in this album ([84.XA.1252.9](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108ZW0)), in which he stands proudly in the imagined ruins of Khartoum confronting a crowd of Sudanese people or Mahdi rebels. Victorian photocollage albums were created in the second half of the nineteenth century almost exclusively by women of the British “Upper Ten Thousand”—the aristocracy and the landed gentry—England’s landowning class. Mak…