I was saddened last month to learn of the death of Roger Vaughan , whose extensive collection of Victorian and Edwardian photographs enabled him to create a very helpful array of online material. I had been unaware of his career as a geologist until I saw an obituary in The Geological Curator July , vol. A security issue is currently making Roger's latest web pages inaccessible at RootsWeb but some have been preserved, at least partially, by the Internet Archive and more links are active from his index page.
I assume that page would have been updated after if he had gleaned any further insights into the enigmatic dots and dashes printed near the words Marion, Imp. It would be interesting to know if anyone else has investigated their significance.
My own brief study of a relatively small sample of portraits has failed to confirm the existence of an annual date code. Although some sort of evolving trend is apparent during the course of the s and s, there are often far less cryptic indicators of earliest possible dates, such as registered designs. I wonder whether the first of the designs illustrated there, dated c.
Has anybody examined these at Kew? Roger's observed dates of usage in the s for four of Marion's registered designs listed at the foot of his page could be misleading. Links to examples of those designs are included in the following list, along with a few others I have come across. Rd No Reclining lady. Rd No ? Rd No Bouquet. Rd No Seated artist. His mounts appear to challenge the accuracy of for ''Marion Imp. The previous decade seems equally unlikely, since Urbinsky was elsewhere until Was it really a date code?
Did Marion put similar marks on other products? If this was the company's discreet method of identifying particular batches or employees who may have been neither inflexible nor infallible in their application of the code what was the advantage over simply adding sequential numbers or initials?
