Tuesday 16th December - Ave Maria

Today is my last book club of the year at work and we've been reading War of the Worlds by H G Wells and I feel traumatised. Blimey, that was far scarier than I was expecting and I now worry that we will be invaded by Martians, although apparently the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one... Back to the books!

Ave Maria (1905) Emma Barton

I must admit, I didn't know anything about Emma Barton before embarking on this, so I am very much looking forward to this one. Obviously, having written Light and Love, I am a fan of early photography, but Mrs Barton is the generation after Mrs Cameron, so let's have a little look.

The Awakening (1903)

Okay, I can see a definite Cameron influence here and so I'm happy. The Awakening was probably her best known photograph, winning her a medal at the Royal Photographic Society exhibition of 1903 and also appeared in the British section of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, Missouri in 1904.

The Soul of the Rose (1905) (after J W Waterhouse's painting of the same name)

Born in Birmingham in 1872, Emma Boaz Rayson was the daughter of  Ambrose and Elizabeth Rayson. Ambrose, a boatman, was already a widower by the age of 31, so when he married Elizabeth (daughter of a boatman, so possibly how they met) it might have been the case of having to get married as little Emma appeared barely 9 months later. She was joined by 6 siblings in very quick succession, the last, Ambrose jnr was born the same month in 1885 his father died, leaving Elizabeth with seven children (although Ambrose jnr died the year after and William (b.1880) died when he was 9).  Elizabeth married again in 1890 to Edgar Birchler (1846=1903) who ran a tripe shop (lovely). 

St Margaret (c.1903)

According to her Wikipedia page, Emma (or Emmie as she is often referred to as in censuses) was introduced to photography by the brother-in-law of her stepfather (which is nice and confusing) - Edgar had four sisters - Louisa, Mary, Matilda and Clara, and it was Louisa's husband, Walter, who was the photographer according to 1891 census. According to a brief internet search, he ran a studio called the Highgate Studio at 110 Moseley Road in Brum and Ebay has lots of his work for sale such as this one.

By 1891, Emma had got a job as a clerk in a manufacturers office, and the family was living next door to Walter so I think we can guess where she got her introduction to photography. It was around this time she also met, then 'married' George Albert Barton. I use the term loosely as there are no records of their marriage apart from the 1911 census claiming they had got married 19 years previously, so around 1892. Their daughter Dorothy was born in the summer of 1893 and it is suggested that one of the impetuses for Emma taking up photography was to photograph her children. Whilst she does seem to have used her children as models, I wonder how often that is suggested about male photographers?

Family Group (c.1908)

In the picture are (from the left) Emma's son Aubrey (1894-1969), then Emma, then daughters Marjorie (1896-1985) and Hilda (1899-1969), then Cecil (the baby in The Awakening) (1901-1981) and finally Dorothy (1893-1962).  The fact that she regularly used her children is probably the same reason that Julia Margaret Cameron used her grandchildren, friends and maids, because they were there. She also featured herself in many, including The Awakening, giving her more in common with Cindy Sherman than Cameron on that front. 

Dorothy and Rose (c.1905)

I'm guessing the lass in Ave Maria was probably Dorothy who seems to crop up quite a bit and would be around the right age. The family all lived in a purpose-built house in Four Oaks Park Estate which contained a dark room. George was a solicitor and nicely off, so married or not, they lived a very respectable life indeed and at the time, Emma was extremely well-known in photographic circles. She even dabbled in autochrome with her 1911 photograph The Blue Bonnet, again featuring Dorothy.

The Blue Bonnet (1911)

I seem to have gone off on a ramble, but returning to Ave Maria it reminds me very much of Rossetti paintings like Prosepine and other three-quarter length paintings and Henry Ryland's beauties, tight up against a patterned background, such as The Guarded Flame painted around the same time...

The Guarded Flame (undated)

Emma and George moved to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight where she died on 4 April 1938 and is buried in Shanklin cemetery (yes, I will be searching for her when I'm next over there). Just as JMC and Clementina Hawarden have had their renaissances, I think it's about time we saw more of Emma Barton and her gorgeous photographs and I would definitely support a retrospective.

See you tomorrow.

Constant Craving

 As I await the publication of my new book (on the 10th September, see this previous post for information) I have been admiring other photographers, like the tart I am, and I was struck by this photograph...

Veiled Profile (1900) Emile Joachim Constant Puyo

...which reminded me, for obvious reasons, of this photograph....

The Angel at the Sepulchre (1869-70) Julia Margaret Cameron

I immediately wanted to know more about the creator of the first image, and what I found were some of the most incredible images which I will now share with you.

Montmartre (c.1906)

(I have to admit this one has a definite perfume of Clementina Hawarden, but that might be the 'balconied-femininity' of it all, but I digress...)

Emile Joachim Constant Puyo, more commonly just referred to as Constant Puyo, or sometimes appallingly anglicized to 'Charles' Puyo (much as Jacques Tissot became 'James'), was born in 1857 in the north-western town of Morlaix in Brittany.  He came from a rather distinguished, middle-class family; his father Edmond was a painter and amateur archaeologist, not to mention mayor of the town between 1871 and 1878 and founder of the town museum.  His uncle Édouard Puyo was a designer and painter and his other uncle Édouard Corbière (I bet Christmas was fun in that house - 'Pass the sprouts Uncle Édouard, no, the other Uncle Édouard') was a maritime writer, author of Le Négrier (1832).  My favourite of Puyo's relatives has to be Tristan Corbière, doomed poet and possessor of both consumption and a mighty fine mustache...

Tristan Corbière, moments before coughing and then tragically dying

I went through a Baudelaire phase, so he's right up my street.  

Anyway, Constant Puyo was a lot less tragically romantic and a lot more alive than his relatives.  No doubt inspired by his father, young Constant loved to draw and paint, training at the local Polytechnic before joining the army.  He served as an artillery officer in what one writer referred to as the 'revenge army' following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. He rose to the rank of Commandant,  and was in charge of a squadron at the School of Artillery at La Fère. All of this left very little time for sketching and Commandant Puyo went in search of a new medium, a quicker medium, in order to capture his images.  He found photography.

Woman Drawing From a Bust (c.1900)

To start with, he photographed friends, family, street scenes, and when he was posted to North Africa, he took photographs of his travels, but all this seemed rather 'documentary' and pedestrian to him, not art. With his posting back to the General Staff in Paris in the late 1880s he began to work on a more pictorial, artistic manner of photography.  

Nude Against the Light (1906)

He helped form the French Salon of Photography in 1894 with his friend and collaborator Robert Demachy, with whom he wrote Notes sur la photographie artistique in 1896.  He not only took photographs, using optical blurring via 'artists' lenses' and the development of gum bichromate and oil transfer, he also wrote at length and passionately on what could be achieved in this new mode of photography.

Summer (c.1900)

He was admitted to The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring in 1896, a British photographic society similarly dedicated to promoting the 'art' of photography.  Strangely enough, I already knew about the Linked Ring because I am a fan of William Smedley-Aston...

Mrs Patrick Campbell reading the Kelmscott Chaucer (1904) William Smedley-Aston

...and I'm a massive fan of his gorgeous wife, artist and model Irene Smedley-Aston...

Irene Smedley-Aston (c.1900) William Smedley-Aston

Good heavens!  Anyway, I digress.  Puyo is most known as a proponent of  Pictorialism, where a seemingly naturalistic scene is manipulated to heightened effect. That way an image is created rather than simply recorded, much like any other work of 'traditional' art.  I particularly like his use of light, in that sort of chiaroscura effect, which is very effective in works such as Mis-en-scene...

Mis-en-scene (c.1900)

He used a combination of natural light and a magnesium flash to create very dramatic 'night' images that capture these alabaster women frozen in a moment of time, theatrically staged and immortalised.

Sacred Song (c.1915)

He retired from the army in 1902 to devote himself to photography.  However, the First World War brought him back into service and he found himself assigned to railway management as he headed towards his sixtieth birthday.  By 1921, despite the fall in popularity of Pictorialism, Puyo found himself the President of the photographic French Salon in Paris until 1926, then he retired back to Morlaix.  He continued to photograph, sending work to a exhibition in Chicago in the summer of 1933, entitled 'A Century of Progress'.  He became ill shortly afterwards and died in the autumn of the same year.  His grave can be found in the graveyard at Saint Martin des Champs, near Morlaix, beside Édouard and Tristan Corbière.  

Sleep (1897)

If you fancy seeing more of Constant Puyo's work, then, quite rightly, the museum in his home town has a wonderful collection. I'll see you on the ferry....

Review: China: Through the Lens of John Thomson

Just opened at the Russell-Cotes is a rather smashing exhibition.  It combines my twin delights of 19th century photography and beautiful women, in an extraordinary collection of large Victorian images taken by groundbreaking photographer and traveller, John Thomson.  What I found especially stunning was the echoes some of the photographs had in some of my favourite 19th century art works...

A Manchu Bride (1871-2)

Scotsman Thomson travelled to the Far East in 1862 and spent the next decade touring Asia documenting his journey with photography.  He spoke enough of the appropriate languages to communicate with his subjects and the results are beautiful and sensitive images of a foreign and yet familiar culture. I particularly liked the photographs of brides, richly decorated and apprehensive, with their enormous headdresses and silk robes.

A Canton Beauty (1869-71)

Thomson arrived in Hong Kong in 1868 and set up a studio there.  His reputation was sealed at home when he was commission to take photographs of Queen Victoria's son, Albert on his visit to the colony.  After Thomson's wife and son returned home in 1870 to avoid disease, Thomson ventured to more rural areas of China, where a white man and a camera were not exactly everyday sights, yet he was welcomed and allowed to do his work.

Thomson and Two Manchu Soldiers (1871)

We are even treated to a 'selfie' of Thomson, posing awkwardly near to soldiers, looking anxiously as his camera captures the image. His images, crystal clear and big, show the beauty of uniforms, the intricate jewellery and silks of the women, and the furniture and accessories of the domestic interiors.  The image above shows west meeting east and the contrast in their appearances.

Bound and Unbound Feet of Two Amoy Women (1871)

He wasn't a man who just marvelled at the beauty however.  Through his images Thomson draws attention to the aspects of the culture of which he was critical.  His powerful image of the bound feet of a woman of status as opposed to her unbound, poorer contemporary makes a horrifying display and showed how something could be seen as beautiful to one culture seems cruel to another.  Mind you, at this point we were squashing women into corsets that were so tight that their organs moved so we're not exactly ones to talk.  Interestingly the anti-foot binding movement seems to have gathered pace at the same time as the 'rational dress' movements in the west, so we aren't that different over all.

A Manchu Lady having her Hair Dressed by a Servant Girl (1871-2)

Thomson also voiced his sympathies with the brides he photographed, likening their lives to slavery, beaten by husbands and mothers-in-law if she did not perform her duties.  The brides often look quite wistful and apprehensive as they are decorated, but Thomson captures both the beauty and the fear.

Manchu Bride (1873)

One thing I really loved seeing was 'outside the frame'.  Obviously the images were made to be seen in a frame, close to the subject, but seeing the entire image shows you the background board and beyond, how the figures sat in their open-air studio regarding the strange Scotsman and his camera with interest.

Annie Chinery Cameron (1873-78) Julia Margaret Cameron

The Blue Bower (1865) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The likes of you will no doubt do as I did and see the parallels, conscious and otherwise, between Thomson's photographs and the fashion in art back in Britain.  Cameron's image of her daughter-in-law (above) definitely came to mind (I wonder if she saw any of her contemporary's works?) and Rossetti's love of the East brings colour to the silks and jewellery, however I do encourage you to go and see the authentic and thought-provoking images of the Far East in this exhibition, which have been displayed alongside pieces from the Russell-Cotes collection.  Merton and Annie Russell-Cotes were also travellers, visiting China around a decade later than Thomson and returning with keepsakes of their journey.  As if you were in any doubt of how small a woman's foot can be bound to, there are tiny shoes on display alongside other objects from Shanghai and Beijing.

China: Through the Lens of John Thomson (1868-1872) is on until June 2019, so plenty of time to see it, and further information can be found here.http://russellcotes.com/event/china/

Review: Painting with Light Exhibition at Tate Britain

Photography is obviously the new black because in the last year I think I've been to more photography exhibitions than I have any other sort.  I entirely blame Julia Margaret Cameron, firstly for having a handy anniversary and secondly for being rather splendid and, dare I say it, commercial. So hot on the heels of all the JMC200 business last year the Tate has produced an exhibition enticingly subtitled Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age.  Well obviously I had to go...

Decorative Study (c.1906) Mina Keene

Full disclosure: I went first thing on a Friday morning and spent a ridiculous amount of time in there. This was mainly because it was empty, which was worrying, especially as it was half term.  However, the lack of other people did mean I could get a good view of everything and stand and stare for as long as I liked without getting elbowed or tutted at.  You can also get as close as is decent to see things you might have missed so I got within licking distance (technical term) of The Death of Chatterton and saw, for the first time that one of his shoes had fallen off.  Also, I had never thought about the fact his jacket is a pinky red colour.  Really?  With that hair?

The Death of Chatterton (1856) Henry Wallis
Note: shoe under the bed, off his right foot

The Stereoscope of Chatterton...

Delicious Chatterton was there because of a rather lovely stereoscope image of him.  It proved so popular that the engravers who were making a fortune from engravings of the expiring poet took the stereoscope people to court to protect their business.  I mean, who wouldn't want to see a 3D Chatterton?  Blimey...

Dandelion Seeds (1852-7) Henry Fox Talbot

However, I am getting ahead of myself.  The first rooms of the exhibition feature earlier, less 'fancy' uses of the bright new craft of photography.  There are a number of impressively sharp cityscapes of Edinburgh taken by David Octavius Hill, a painter in search of an edge.  The photographs contrast well with the more powdery impressionism of Turner's idyllic visions, but I have to admit to preferring Hill's photographs to the precise paintings he produced from them.  Possibly the most impressive, if only in scale, painting in the exhibition greets you as you enter.  The Disruption Portrait, impossible to reproduce here due to the sheer scale of it, shows the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland signing the Act of Separation and the Deed of Demission in 1843. There are 457 individual portraits, all crammed in to a room, some looking down from holes in the ceiling and each one is based on a photograph.  It is astonishing but rather too much to cope with, so I prefer the portrait and self portrait of William Etty...

William Etty (1844) David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Self Portrait (1846) William Etty

When Etty was in Edinburgh for a Scottish Royal Academy dinner, Hill and Adamson convinced him to have a photograph taken.  He then took that as the basis of a self portrait but it was unusual because he was not looking out at us (as he would have been if he was painting from a mirror).  The result is the ability to paint oneself in repose and 'unaware' of the viewer's gaze which feels very modern and also makes the best of his rather splendid profile. That is an impressive nose...

The Courtyard of a Late Gothic Wooden House at Abbeville (1868) John Ruskin

It really shouldn't come as a surprise that the Pre-Raphaelites are such natural bedfellows with photography, after all what could be more 'truth to nature' than a photograph?  John Ruskin's very impressive photographs feature in the exhibition, and it seemed that very quickly the idea of using photographs to get the desired verisimilitude into your work was essential.  There are a number of paintings of the Holy Lands by Thomas Seddon and William Holman Hunt, together with photographs of various settlements on show.  We know that when Hunt started showing the Holy Family as, well, a Middle Eastern Jewish family, there was outrage and one can only imagine the same was true of the landscape which was completely different to England.  The photographs of Nazareth act as both an aide-memoire for the artists but also a sort of proof of the existence of God, because I suppose the average British church goer had no clue, beyond their illustrated Bible, what the Holy Land looked like.  Photographs of  towns filled with flat roofs and occasional minerettes give tangible existence to the stories that were set there and truth to the images painted from there.  The only thing that I miss in the photographs is that hot volcanic sky that Hunt shows, all swirls of pink in the blue, the lurid result of erupted gases (if you excuse the expression).  The photographs are a wonderful record but miss the essential life of the area.  However, as I moved on through the exhibition, things certainly came to life...

Isabelle Grace Maude (1862-3) Clementina Lady Hawarden

Slightly shamefully I must admit that I far prefer images of people to still life and landscape.  I feel an instant connection and involvement and so the parts of the exhibition that dealt with pictures such as Lady Hawarden's claustrophobic images of studied female repose held me utterly captivated. Whilst very theatrical and self conscious, Lady Hawarden's repetition of female figures in sparse rooms, fluttering at the window-light like butterflies feel more dreamlike than posed, unlike Roger Fenton's output, or Edward Linley Sambourne's photographs of the rather naked Ethel Warwick.  Hawarden's work stands out in the room because there does not seem to be the desire to record in detail for 'academic purposes' (she says, with a raise eyebrow).  My favourite 'academic purpose' image has to be Rose the Model...

Rose the Model (1865) Samuel Butler

Well, heavens to Betsy! Everybody get a firm hold on their academic purposes and we shall continue. There was a feeling that the human body should be recorded to compare with classical sculpture and this is certainly the case with Rose (which I'm guessing is the chap's last name) and his very impressive regions.  We obviously don't need to see his face (the phrase about not looking at mantlepieces while stoking fires comes to mind) but the record of his muscles is amazing.  I wonder what he did for a living?

Two's Company, Three's None (1892) Marcus Stone

HRH Princess Alexandra, HRH Princess Victoria & Mr Savile (1892-3)

Moving on swiftly, we come to my favourite bit of the exhibition, the recreation of (and inspiration by) paintings in photographs.  There seemed a bit of a vogue for being photographed in the manner of a painting in a tableaux vivant, as shown above by Princesses Alexandra and Victoria (and the lucky Mr Savile) recreating Marcus Stone's melancholic Two's Company, Three's None, obviously for their own amusement, but some people took it very seriously.  It seems the Moxon Tennyson had a lot to answer for...

Morte D'Arthur (1857) Daniel Maclise

The Passing of Arthur (1875) Julia Margaret Cameron

There was obviously something about the illustrations to Tennyson's poems that inspired photographers because Cameron wasn't the only one to call on them for inspiration.  The exhibition also shows Lady Hawarden's destraught daughter in the pose Millais Mariana, also from Moxon, as well as Henry Peach Robinson's Lady of Shalott with her heavily crimped hair. 

Living Picture: Pastoral Scene (1896) Arranged by Walter Crane

Poling the Marsh Hay 1885-6 (1887) Peter Henry Emerson and Thomas Frederick Goodall

Not all are wonderful however and I found some of the aesthetic 'rural' idylls to be appalling, as opposed to the realist works of Peter Henry Emerson and Thomas Frederick Goodall.  I wrongly assumed that Crane's vision pre-dated the Norfolk scenes and could be excused by a lack of technology, but quite the opposite.  Emerson and Goodall show life from a decade before Cranes' studio arrangement.  Maybe there was something about the work of such artists as George Clausen in the 1880s that lent itself more sympathetically to the medium of photography, unlike the very stylistic and mannered unreality of aesthetic art. Whatever the reason the Crane picture looked like a publicity shot from a bad amateur theatrical unlike Emerson and Goodall who seem to be making a Thomas Hardy documentary...

Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die (1870-75) Julia Margaret Cameron and
Beata Beatrix (1864-70) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The bit that made me overexcited and happy (other than Rose the Model) was the direct juxtapositioning of paintings to photographs, such as the Cameron and Rossetti above.  I'll have to show you more of these over on my Facebook page or else we'll be here all day but I had never thought of placing these two together.  The moment they are side by side then a lightbulb goes on and intentionally or not, Cameron has captured what makes Beata Beatrix such a powerful image.  Look at the hair and jaw and the neck! Goodness me.

Monna Pomona (1864) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lady Ottoline Morrell (c.1907) Adolph de Meyer

The last few pages of notes I took in the exhibition are basically me exclaiming over the beauty of the images such as Adolph de Meyer's portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell.  I am a sucker for autochrome and the Tate have displayed some of the images on lightboxes which made me slightly incoherent with pleasure at the luminous beauty of it all. If you ever had doubts that photography was an art form, the final room especially will convert you. William A Stewart's Ex Umbris echoes Orpheus and Eurydice but also is a touching and erotic image of love and death, so coverted by the Victorians. 

The Japanese Parasol (1906) John Cimon Warburg

Photography pushes the boundaries of decency whilst mirroring high art and to see the two together is disconcerting but fascinating.  The genius of the exhibition is that you have room after room of the story of art photography from Fox Talbot's dandelion seeds to Lady Ottoline and her lilies with a coherent and inspiring narrative of how we got there.  The photographs used are beautiful and the paintings are well-chosen and familiar enough to be reassessed in a different context.

Prosepine (1874) D G Rossetti and The Odor of Pomegranates (1899) Zaida Ben-Yusuf (details)

The catalogue is surprisingly cheap at £15 and beautifully illustrated although not everything in the exhibition is in the catalogue (as far as I can see) so I urge you to experience both if at all possible.  It is certainly the best exhibition I've seen at the Tate for a while and surprised me in both its interpretation and how much gleeful giggling I did.  Despite the entry fee, I am hoping to see it again during the summer because it is just so good. 

Painting with Light is on until 25th September and further details can be found here.

A Well-Connected Woman of Photographs

Welcome to my 500th blog post! When I reached 400 I wrote a piece on Julia Margaret Cameron's model (and my current obsession) Mary Hillier, so it's rather a coincidence that 100 posts later I am back talking about early photography.  Or rather, I suppose it isn't, as my current novel features a Victorian photographer so I am rather interested in the subject.  Anyway, today's piece is about a photographer who knew Julia Margaret Cameron and also acted as model for another rather infamous photographer of the age.  Today's subject is Sarah Angelina Acland, the First Lady of Colour Photography...

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Theodore, Sarah and Harry Acland (1856) Charles Dodgson

When Sarah Angelina Acland (Or 'Angie' as she preferred) was 7 years old, she and her brothers sat for an Oxford photographer named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.  They missed out on being his first group of children photographed, that honour going to their friends the Liddell girls.  They were the children of Henry Wentworth Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine, and lived among the artistic and famous in Oxford.  Miss Acland remembered Rossetti and gang painting the murals in the Union and occasionally giving her his palette. Ruskin stayed with them in their home and it was when Julia Margaret Cameron was paying visit to him that Miss Acland met the woman who would influence her later career.  Ruskin did not admire Mrs Cameron's work and Miss Acland remembered Julia exclaiming 'John Ruskin, you are not worthy of photographs!'  When Sarah Acland took up photography she at least managed something that Julia did not, photographing Ruskin.

John Ruskin (1893)

Miss Acland's interest in art resulted in her parents encouraging her to take lessons from Ruskin to whom she grew very close.  In 1870, their relationship became such a concern to her parents that he was moved out by her father, but she continued to see him and became for all intents and purpose his secretary.

Photography in Oxford was a growing occupation with its implication in science, art appreciation, and travel.  Angie's father assembled an album of photographs at home and offered encouragement to the upcoming photographers in their circle, including Charles Dodgson.

Kodak No. 3 (c.1890)

For her 42nd birthday, Miss Acland was given a Kodak No.3 camera by her father which must have been the ubiquitous present to give to the bored middle-aged woman in your life (really, I'm 42, I'd love one).  She began her career, specialising in portraits of the ready-made assembly of the great and the good of Oxford.  In 1899 she was described in Amateur Photographer as 'a lady amateur photographer who has applied herself chiefly to portraiture with quite extraordinary success.'

Miss M A Hope (1894)

Mary Agnes Hope was Miss Acland's god-daughter and one of her most frequent sitters.  In a photograph that reminds me very much of George Charles Beresford's image of Virginia Woolf from almost a decade later, it is obvious that taking a 'likeness' of Miss Hope is not the primary reason for the photograph.  The elegance of her profile, the interesting detail on the back of her blouse have more attention than what she looks like.



Miss Denniston (1895)

Gertrude Denniston was the Lady Superintendent of the Acland Nursing Home (named after Miss Acland's mother) and her closest friend outside her family. She is posed next to the incredible zoomorphic chimney piece in the Nursing Home, which has the Acland motto carved into it - 'There is no place like home'. The animals are utterly astonishing and make quite an impact in the picture.  I'd like to think that a couple of them are wombats...




Mrs Peard (left) and Miss F. M. Peard (right) (1893)

Mrs Peard, a naval widow and her daughter were photographed while Miss Acland was overwintering in Devon. Frances Mary Peard was a novelist, author of 15 books and is presumably posed reading one, but I love the vaguely cheeky expression on her mother's face that shows marvellous spirit in the 88 year old's face.

The reason that Sarah Angelina Acland is so important in the history of photography is not just for her skill but also for her pioneering work with colour.  In 1899 she began experiments in colour by photographing a scene through 3 different filters (red, green and blue) then combining the images. This moved onto to a slightly more refined method of a screen of parallel red, green and blue lines providing composite images such as this beautiful image of poppies...

Oxford Garden (1905)

The invention of the Autochrome process in 1907 that sealed Sarah Angelina Acland's reputation as a pioneer. By this point, she had already given four lectures on colour photography but with the advent of Autochrome things became a lot simpler.  If I understand it, instead of having three separate plates to combine and make the colour, you stain potato starch the three colours and spread them over the glass plate in turn, then add your emulsion (which in this case is panchromatic).  When you put your glass plate in the camera, instead of facing the emulsion to the lens (like I did with wet collodion), you turn the glass plate so that the image will pass through your coloured potato starch layers before getting 'stuck' on the sensitive emulsion.  Ta da!

A Portrait Outdoors (1907)

I think that the marvellous thing about Autochrome is that the image is made out of tiny points of intense colour, so things like the red of the geraniums really hit you. A Portrait Outdoors shows Miss Acland's goddaughter Mary Agnes Brinton (nee Hope) on the steps of Clevedon House, Oxford.  The image was awarded the red rosette (on the top left hand corner) in the 1908 Oxford Camera Club exhibition.

Spoiled Autochrome Plate (left) and digitally restored (right)

These two plates are the earliest colour pictures of John Everett Millais' infamous portrait of Ruskin, hanging in Miss Acland's house in Oxford c.1913-17.  The left is the spoiled plate where the green dye had spread and affected the finished colour balance.  On the right is a digital restoration to show how it should look.  The picture above the Ruskin portrait, by the way, is We Are Seven by Elizabeth Siddal.

The Poor Thing (1911)

The above pictures were taken in Gibraltar where Miss Acland stayed with her brother, William, who was Admiral Superintendent of the Gibraltar dockyard. The picture on the left is an Autochrome whilst the right is a Dufay Dioptichrome plate, an attempt to make colours more 'true' and less extreme, by passing the light through a geometric filter screen which was finer and sometimes separate from the plate. The difference is marked as the colour in the Autochrome plate is more vibrant, especially the red/green contrast.

Companions (1910)

This is a self portrait of Sarah Angelina Acland and the blur at her feet is her dog, Chum, taken in the garden of her home in Oxford.  The Autochrome process required a long exposure time which means Chum becomes a fluffy blur.

Self Portrait (1928)

This is the last known self portrait of Miss Acland, taken two years before her death, in her Oxford home. At her death, notices appeared in the British Journal of Photography and The Times praising her use of colour and her excellent skills in portraiture.  Her collection of negatives, prints and transparencies were eventually bequeathed to the Bodleian Library and her equipment to the Museum of the History of Science, where in the 1980s the collection was reconciled. The most beautiful catalogue of her work, written by Giles Hudson is where I got the above pictures and information from.  I cannot recommend it enough and it can be purchased from here (UK) and here (USA) and at a second hand bookshop of your choice, no doubt.  I thoroughly recommend it.  It would be lovely if, on this 200th Anniversary of Julia Margaret Cameron's birth we can also raise the profile of another pioneer of the photographic arts who derived so much inspiration from her. 

Flora (1910)