No photographer's name appears on any of the residue pages which is why Sotheby's sold the set as anonymous. However, Henry Peach Robinson can be identified with these two images of his parents – his mother Eliza (d. June 25, 1859) and his father John (d. February 7 1855). Plate 24 of Margaret F. Harker's monograph on Robinson shows a beautiful photographic portrait of Eliza Robinson, her youth lovingly restored by her son with heavy oil retouching. Details of this oil study and the above cameo are juxtaposed below. There is no photograph of Robinson's father in Harker, only an early drawing and another wonderfully hideous sketch of his mother. The mouths that Robinson gives his parents in those drawings are no wider then the breadth of their noses, a Freudian horror vacui which had abated a little by the time of the oil study. When comparing the two images below, the scholar should consider the possibility that the oil study is a composite of the face of Robinson's mother pasted onto the body of his wife (shudder).
