#otma

Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia in Sevastopol, 1909

The Tsarina wrote in her diary “Today, the girls were photographed all day by [Alexander] Funk, as they needed new photos to give to their committees.” The four Grand Duchesses organised the photoshoot to help raise money for their charitable committees during WWI, with the profits from the sale of photographs helping fund committee work.

Tatiana Nikolaevna’s committee was particularly famous throughout the country, helping refugees to reconnect with family members and loved ones who they had lost during upheaval. As Tatiana Nikolaevna’s committee was the most popular, it therefore sold more copies, and it is no coincidence that multiple photographs of her have been recovered in good quality.

As the photographs were sold directly and not as widely internationally produced postcards, there are very few photographs that have been recovered in high quality. It appears that a photograph of Maria Nikolaevna is missing completely, and possibly a photograph of Tatiana Nikolaevna with Anastasia Nikolaevna posing together, to match the paired up photograph of their sisters.

Maria Nikolaevna wrote in her diary “Funk photographed us”, whilst Olga Nikolaevna gave more details in a letter to her father, writing “We were photographed endlessly by Funk today and we were bored and didn’t go out.”

Sources below the cut

In the first carriage:Nicholas,Alexandra,Olga and Alexei.

Second carriage:Tatiana,Maria and Anastasia.

Guys, please credit me for the footage if you post it on other social media.I did pay for some of this footage(or it took a lot of time to find them) and it takes even more time to edit them into looking more decent and understandable😭

I saw some people on tik tok post them without any credits,I won't name them😶‍🌫️I hope y'all can understand my point and respect my wishes if you want me to keep posting this kind of rare content!:)