Fine Art Photography Series
Photographers of the 19th-Century
Top Camera Artists, William Fox Talbot, Joseph Niepce, Louis Daguerre.

Queen Victoria with Abdul Karim (1887)
And dog!.

Photographers: 19th-Century
The Top 80 Camera Artists and Inventors

Contents

• Introduction
• List of the Top 80 Photographers of the 19th-Century

Introduction

Fine art photography of today owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the cameramen, scientists, inventors, and other modern artists of the nineteenth century, who pioneered the processes from which modern photography has evolved. These individuals made a huge contribution to fine art - not least because of the impact of photography on plein-air Impressionism - as well as to the history of photography. In addition, their inventions have led to the emergence of new branches of science which have given us new types of art including animation and video.

See below for a selected list of some of the best known nineteenth century photographers and photographic firms, whose names are household words to collectors and dealers. (Note: for a brief explanation of the most popular terms used, see: Art Photography Glossary.)

Portrait of General Custer (1865).

Portrait of the photographer and
camera artist William Fox Talbot
in 1864.

A very unflattering portrait of the
great French photographer
Eugene Atget - chronicler of late
19th century Paris architecture.

List of the Top 80 Most Famous 19th-Century Photographers

Here is a short list of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century.

Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon (1811-81)
Born in France, Adam-Salomon began life as a sculptor and carried his artistic talents - some say excessively - into his photography. A great believer in draping, side-lighting, and retouching, he collaborated with Carjat, Nadar, and others, in the seven volumes of the Galerie des Contemporains published in France in the 1850s.

Robert Adamson (1821-48)
The name of Robert Adamson, who was born near St. Andrews in 1821, is inseparably linked with that of David Octavius Hill. During his short life, Adamson made, in conjunction with Hill, over 1500 calotypes of Scottish notables, workers, and genre scenes, assuming responsibility for the photographic technique. Adamson's technical skill was a perfect foil for Hill's artistry, and calotypes produced by the two men remain unequalled.

Giuseppe Alinari (1836-90) Leopoldo Alinari (died 1865)
The firm of Alinari Brothers was founded in Florence in 1834 and quickly established itself among Italy's leading photographers. Alinari made many thousands of large (12x16") albumen prints of European churches, historic buildings, and art treasures. The firm also produced a number of cartes-de-visite. Alinari prints sometimes bear the name Bardi, the printsellers' financier.

James Anderson (Isaac Atkinson) (1813-77)
James Anderson was born in Cumberland and spent most of his working life in Italy, first as a sculptor but by 1849 as a professional photographer. Anderson produced many hundreds of commercial photographs of Rome and art objects in Italian museums. He died in Rome in 1877. The family firm survived until the 1960s.

James Craig Annan (1864-1946)
James Craig Annan, the son of Thomas Annan was born in Hamilton, Scotland, in 1864. He trained in his father's studio and was responsible for making, in 1890, copy prints of the work of Hill and Adamson and introducing them to the USA and Europe.

Thomas Annan (1829-87)
A leading Scottish portrait and landscape photographer, Annan worked for many years in Glasgow, producing photographically illustrated books and a record of the Glasgow slums for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust. A limited edition of the Glasgow slum photographs was issued in 1878.

Ottomar Anschutz (1846-1907)
Like Muybridge, Anschutz experimented with instantaneous photography, producing excellent photographs of birds and animals at the Breslau Zoo. In 1886 he used Muybridge's system of 24 linked cameras to photograph German military manoeuvres and troops marching. For the purpose of improving military training methods, Anschutz developed his tachyscope in 1887, which was a type of zoetrope with a cylinder mounted on a horizontal axis, using 24 images which, when rotated, gave an impression of movement.

Edward Anthony (1818-88)
Anthony undertook, in 1841, the first photographic survey to be commissioned by the American Government, a survey of the North-East frontier with Canada. A year later, in 1842, he opened, in partnership with Jonas Edwards, a portrait studio in Washington, where in 1843 he photographed the members of Congress. Anthony founded, with his brother, H.T.Anthony, a photographic supply house, which produced and sold, in 1859, among other things stereoscopic views of New York.

Eugene Atget (1856-1927)
A dedicated man, who died in poverty after spending nearly thirty years photographing the changing face of Paris, Atget was sadly neglected during his lifetime. Since 1930, however, when a selection of his photographs was published, the importance of his unique form of street photography has become increasingly regarded as a record of Parisian architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. See also: Victorian architecture of the late 19th century.

Edouard Baldus (1820-82)
Born in Germany in 1820, Baldus worked in France and became a French citizen. Apart from photographing landscapes and Alpine views, Baldus produced thousands of calotypes and wet plate photographs of Paris and its monuments, statues, and art objects. Like many others who made large prints, Baldus was adversely affected by the growing popularity of the cheap carte-de-visite and retired from photography.

George N. Barnard (1819-1902)
George Barnard, who used the daguerreotype process, was one of the team of 15 photographers employed by Mathew Brady to record the American Civil War, and in 1866 accompanied General Sherman on his march through Georgia. In 1865 he published an album of documentary photography as a record of the campaign under the title Photographic views of Sherman's campaign.

H. Walter Barnett (1862-1934)
After working for a number of years in Australia and America, Barnett settled in England, opening a portrait studio at Hyde Park Corner. An ability to make the best of his sitters, and especially society women, who flocked to his studio, brought Barnett international fame.

William Barraud (1810-90)
Best remembered for his two volumes of Men and Women of the Day, published in 1888-89, Barraud took cabinet portraits of many famous Victorian statesmen, artists, and members of the aristocracy.

Hippolyte Bayard (1801-87)
A portrait and landscape photographer, Bayard was an early experimenter with photography, and he was able, in 1839, to produce positive photographs on paper. Bayard did not make his process public, however, until 1840, thus forfeiting recognition as one of the earliest inventors of photography. Bayard never became a professional photographer, preferring to keep his amateur status and using, at one time or another, almost all the known photographic processes. He was for 15 years, from 1866-1881, the Honorary Secretary of the Societe Francaise de Photographie.

Richard Beard (1802-88)
Although it is probable that Beard, who started his working life as a coal merchant in London, never personally took a photograph, he deserves a place here as one of the first, and possibly the greatest, entrepreneurs of photography. He was responsible for the commercial realization of many photographic advances, including the enlarger, the shortening of exposure times, and the hand colouring of daguerreotypes. In 1841 Beard opened England's first public photographic studio in London.

Felice A. Beato (1832-1909)
Best known as a war photographer who took gruesome photographs of the Opium War of 1860, Beato travelled extensively in the Near and Middle East before going to the Crimea with Robertson. In 1860 he went to China and photographed the Opium War. In 1885 he covered the campaign in the Sudan, which led to the unsuccessful attempt to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum.

Francis Bedford (1816-94)
A noted topographical photographer, Bedford produced consistently good photographs of English cathedrals, castles, monuments, and landscape scenes, often as cartes-de-visite or stereoscopic prints. In 1862 he recorded the tour of the Prince of Wales to the Middle East.

Louis Auguste Bisson (1814-76) Auguste Rosalie Bisson (1826-1900)
After opening, in 1841, one of the first daguerreotype studios in Paris under the name of Bisson Freres, the brothers visited Switzerland in 1860 as part of the entourage of the Empress Eugenie and there produced some of the earliest and most splendid Alpine photographs in the history of photography. Bisson Freres are equally famous for their photographs of French and Italian churches and cathedrals, and their early portraits.

Samuel Bourne (1834-1912)
He photographed scenes in India, Kashmir, and the Himalayas during the 1860s and 1870s, overcoming innumerable mishaps and difficulties in order to do so. Bourne later opened photographic studios in Bombay, Calcutta, and Simla.

Mathew Brady (1823-96)
Mathew Brady, one of the best known American photographers of the 19th century, became a professional in 1844 and was soon much sought after for his fine portraits, although of over 30,000 photographs produced by his firm in 1861 less than 100 are attributed to Brady himself. When the American Civil War broke out, Brady gathered together a team of photographers and recorded the conflict for posterity. Unlike Fenton and Robertson in the Crimea, Brady and his team did not hesitate to show the horrors of war. Six thousand of his team's negatives were purchased by the War Department in 1875, and they form a comprehensive record of the America of those years.

Caldesi & Co
Born in Italy, Caldesi lived and worked in England. In partnership with Montecchi and later with Blandford, Caldesi produced many early photographs of art treasures in English collections; among his best known are the Photographs of the Gems of the Art Treasures Exhibition, held in Manchester in 1857, and his Photographic Historical Portrait Gallery, published by Colnaghi in 1864. In the 1860s Caldesi and his partners also produced carte-de-visite portraits.

Henry Herschel Hay Cameron (1852-1911)
Was the youngest son of Julia Margaret Cameron. As might be expected he was greatly influenced by his mother's style, producing portraits of actors and celebrities. Lewis Carroll once said of him that he was the only professional photographer who dared to produce a portrait which was exactly like the original. Cameron opened a studio in London but later gave up photography in order to become an actor.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79)
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in India and was the mother of six children; she was introduced to photography by her daughter in 1863 and threw herself into this new hobby with characteristic enthusiasm. Mrs Cameron was, without doubt, one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of photography. During the latter half of her life she produced, using soft focus and close up, some of the greatest portrait studies of all time, studies that can only be faulted for her habit of sentimentalizing her sitters and her lack of care and skill in developing and processing. (See also: Pictorialism.) Despite these faults, it is generally acknowledged that her best portraits are unequalled and today they are eagerly sought after by collectors. In 1875 Mrs Cameron illustrated, with a series of oddly posed photographs, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a glance at which confirms the superiority of her portraits over her attempts at posing groups of people to illustrate a story.

Note: From its invention in the 1830s, photography has been dogged by issues of aesthetics and by its relationship to other types of fine art, notably painting. Even today, art critics continue to debate the question: Is Photography Art?

Etienne Carjat (1828-1906)
Carjat started his career in caricature art, a genre that he followed for ten years. It was once said of his photographic technique: "He does not torture them, dislocate their necks, distort their arms or legs ... he only asks them to strike a natural pose." Carjat, who worked in Paris, photographed many famous people; among his best portraits are those of Baudelaire and Sarah Bernhardt.

Antoine Claudet (1797-1867)
Born in France, he lived for most of his life in England. In 1841 he vastly improved Daguerre's process by reducing the time of exposure and later made a number of other contributions to photography. Among these were the use of painted backgrounds and the dark room light. He was appointed photographer to Queen Victoria in 1853. As well as daguerreotype portraits, Claudet produced many stereoscopic photographs.

Charles Clifford (1820-63)
Although born in England, Clifford lived and worked for most of his life in Spain and became Court photographer to Queen Isabella the Second. He produced a great number of calotype photographs of Spain's topography and architecture as well as studies of art works in Spanish museums. In 1861 Clifford visited England and took formal portraits of Queen Victoria. He died in Madrid in 1863.

Robert Cornelius (1809-93)
An American pioneer of photography, Cornelius specialized in silver plating during the early 1830s, which brought him into contact with the daguerreotype. This resulted in his creation of a landmark self-portrait, one of the first ever photographic portraits of a person. During the early 1840s, he went on to operate two of the earliest photographic studios in America.

Joseph Cundall (1818-1895)
An art historian turned photographer, Cundall contributed landscape and architectural photographs to Delamotte's The Sunbeam. Later, in partnership with Downes and subsequently Fleming, he produced carte-de-visite portraits and a series of photographs of the architectural details of Wells Cathedral. For biographical details of contemporary exponents of architectural photography, see: Bernd and Hilla Becher (b.1931, 34).

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851)
Daguerre, who gave his name to the daguerreotype, is without doubt the best known of the photographic inventors. Starting his working life as a scene painter in Paris theatres and as an artist, Daguerre became interested in photography and in 1829 went into partnership with Niepce. Ten years later and six years after Niepce's death he wrote an account of his daguerreotype process which ran into over thirty editions in two years. Daguerre was showered with honours, including the Pour le Merite from Prussia and a life pension by the French Government.

George Davison (1856-1930)
A gifted amateur photographer, Davison was, like Emerson, an exponent of the 'Naturalistic School' of photography. He was the managing director of Kodak Ltd. from 1898-1912. Davison died in France in 1930.

Philip Henry Delamotte (1820-1889)
A successful calotype photographer who worked in London, Delamotte spent two and a half years photographing the rebuilding of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, producing in mid-1854 what was probably England's first 'press' photograph, a view of the opening of the palace by Queen Victoria. Delamotte published a number of photographic books and journals as well as editing, in 1859, The Sunbeam, an early photographic journal.

Andre Disderi (1819-1889)
Disderi, Court photographer to Napoleon the Third, was the man most responsible for the introduction of the carte-de-visite and thus the popularization of cheap photography. During the 1850s and 1860s, Disderi, who had studios in Paris, London and Madrid, took carte-de-visite portraits of many members of the royal families and high society of Europe.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898)
Although best known as the author of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He produced over a period of more than twenty years excellent portraits of children and celebrities. Carroll was always at his best with children, and this is perhaps why his pictures of little girls - Carroll did not like boys - are among the most charming examples of child photography in the Victorian era. In 1880, perhaps as a result of the popularity of the dry plate process, which he thought inartistic, Carroll gave up photography.

Maxime Du Camp (1822-1894)
A well known French explorer, he was at first contemptuous of photography. However, in 1849 he toured the Middle East with Gustave Flaubert the novelist and on his return published a book containing a hundred and twenty-five of his photographs, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, which was published in Paris in 1852.

Jonas M. Edwards (1813-98)
A co-founder with Edward Anthony and others of the National Daguerreotype Miniature Gallery, Edwards made portraits of many famous American personalities during the 1840s and 50s.

Elliott & Fry
One of the best known and prolific firms of commercial photographers in London, Elliott & Fry worked for many years at 55 Baker Street, London. They produced carte-de-visite and cabinet photographs, many of which still exist in private and public collections.

Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936)
After four years as an amateur, Emerson, in 1886, became a professional photographer and during the next ten years produced seven books on the life and landscape of East Anglia, illustrating them with his photographs. Emerson was the leading advocate of the 'Naturalistic School' of photography, which attacked what it considered to be the artificiality of the photography of the time: retouching, composite prints made from several negatives and the too rigid photographic style of the day. Today, Emerson's photographs, although not regarded as highly as they once were, are finding their worth as examples of a reaction against the 'academic' standards of his time.

William England (1830-96)
For nine years chief photographer of the London Stereoscopic Company he took stereoscopic views in Europe and America. In 1863, England started work on his own and produced, over a period of more than twenty years, widely acclaimed photographs of topographical scenes in Switzerland and Italy.

Roger Fenton (1819-1869)
Born in Lancashire, Fenton first became interested in photography in the early 1840s while studying oil painting under Paul Delaroche in Paris. In the late 1840s Fenton became a member of the Calotype Club and later formed the Photographic Society of London (now the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain) becoming in January 1853 its first secretary. One of Fenton's earlier commissions was to record in 1851 the work on the suspension bridge over the Dnieper at Kiev then being constructed by Charles Vignoles, a fellow member of the Calotype Club. Fenton soon won international acclaim with his landscapes and views of English cathedrals, still life and intimate studies of the Royal Family. He also photographed drawings and classical sculpture at the British Museum. His fame rests, however, on his 360 photographs of the Crimean War undertaken for the Manchester publisher Thomas Agnew. Fenton became Vice President of the Royal Photographic Society in 1858, but in 1862 at the height of his fame he gave up photography.

Francis Frith (1822-1898)
Starting life as a grocer's apprentice, Frith became interested in photography in the late 1840s and in 1850 became a partner in a photographic firm in Liverpool, later moving to Reigate in Surrey, where the firm of Frith & Co. remained in existence until 1970. For almost fifty years Frith was the most productive landscape photographer in England and during that period his firm produced hundreds of thousands of photographs of the British Isles, Europe and the Near and Middle East. In 1864 Frith published The Gossiping Photographer at Hastings and in 1865 he illustrated Longfellow's Hyperion.

Alexander Gardner (1821-1882)
Born in Scotland, Gardner went to America in 1856 and became an assistant to Mathew Brady with whom he later quarrelled. Gardner left Brady's studio in 1863 and set up on his own. He published in 1866 his Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War and later worked on a 'Rogues Gallery' for the Washington Police Department.

W. Gregory & Co (51, Strand, London)
W. Gregory & Co., whose studios were in London, are best remembered for the comprehensive record they made in the 1890s of military, naval and ceremonial uniforms. Because of their large format and clarity, their photographs are of great value to military historians.

Viscountess Hawarden (1822-1865)
A distinguished amateur photographer, Viscountess Hawarden's work was, until comparatively recently, little known. She lived in Kensington, London, where in the early 1850s she began to produce hundreds of photographs of her five daughters as well as many fancy dress and genre scenes. A number of her portraits have a 'Spanish' look, possibly because Viscountess Hawarden's mother, Catalina Paulina Alessandro, was of Spanish extraction.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871)
A distinguished English astronomer and scientist of German descent, Herschel was the first man to use the word 'photography' (from the Greek, written by light). His discovery of the use of mercuric acid and of 'hypo' and his invention of the 'blue print' together with his encouragement of micro photography were an important contribution to the improvement of early photographic processes.

David Octavius Hill (1802-1870)
In partnership with Adamson Hill, who was a mediocre painter, produced in the mid-1840s over fifteen hundred calotypes of notables, genre scenes and the ordinary people of Scotland. Hill turned to photography as an aid to his painting, having been commissioned to paint a picture commemorating the signing of the Act of Separation of the Free Church of Scotland on a vast canvas. Eighteen years after Adamson's death, Hill attempted, in i860, a return to photography but was unable to recapture the excellence of his earlier work. Many reproductions of the work of Hill and Adamson have been made, the finest of which are, without doubt, those made by Thomas Annan at the turn of the century.

Hills & Saunders
From their studios in London and the home counties, Hills & Saunders made a large number of carte-de-visite and cabinet photographs of British notables during the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are especially noted for the many photographs they took of Princess, later Queen, Alexandra and of other members of the Royal Family.

William Henry Jackson (1843-1942)
Jackson settled in Omaha and together with his brother managed a prosperous studio. He took photographs of the building of the Union Pacific railway line and in the 1870s produced over two thousand photographs of the American West.

Dr Thomas Keith (1827-1895)
Using the calotype process Keith, who was an amateur photographer, took during the 1850s some of the earliest photographs of views in Edinburgh and its surrounds.

Wilhelm Langenheim (1807-1874); Friedrich Langenheim (1809-1879)
Born in Germany, the Langenheim brothers worked in Philadelphia during the 1840s daguerreotyping famous American personalities and topographical scenes. They are best known today for their forty daguerreotypes of the Niagara Falls, taken in 1845. From 1849, the Langenheims tried, without success, to interest the American public in calotypes, and from 1851, with better results, in stereoscopic photographs. In the 1850s the brothers produced lantern slides which illustrated well-known stories and songs.

Gustave LeGray (1820-1862)
During the 1850s LeGray gained a reputation as a masterly photographer with his large format photographs of seascapes with clouds, usually made from two negatives, with the cloud formation superimposed onto the seascape. LeGray, like many other professional photographers, started his working career as an artist and opened his photographic portrait studio in Paris in 1848. LeGray gave up photography in i860, probably because of the growing popularity of the carte-de-visite.

The London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company
One of the largest known photographic companies with studios in London, the company issued throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century thousands of carte-de-visite, cabinet and stereoscopic photographs.

Robert MacPherson (1811-1872)
Of Scots descent, MacPherson lived and worked in Rome. He took up photography in the 1850s and became a leading photographer of Roman art and antiquities. MacPherson is also known for his Guide Book to the Sculpture in the Vatican published in 1863 and as an inventor of photographic lithography.

Paul Martin (1864-1942)
The son of a French farmer who migrated to England, Paul Martin was one of the first 'candid camera' photographers. Martin was a very gifted amateur photographer who loved gadgets and took his most striking photographs unobserved, by concealing his camera in a suitcase. His photographs of working class life in London and at the seaside are completely natural and un-posed. Later, Martin took photographs of stage productions and of London by night.

John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1810-1901)
An American daguerreotype portrait photographer who is thought to have been born in Birmingham, Mayall lived in America for some time and returned to England in 1847. Mayall established a chain of highly successful photographic studios in London and the provinces and, turning away from daguerreotypes, produced carte-de-visite and cabinet photographs. In 1853, he patented a device for 'vignetting' (the deliberate fading of the edges of prints to give a soft effect). Mayall was Mayor of Brighton from 1877-78.

Samuel Morse (1791-1872)
Born in Charleston, Mass., Morse is best known as the inventor of the electric telegraph and the Morse code. Morse was, however, also a famous pioneer photographer. He took his first daguerreotype in 1839 and opened a studio in 1840. Although Morse soon gave up active photography, he continued to take an interest in the art, teaching, among others, Mathew Brady and Edward Anthony.

James Mudd (1821-96)
Once a textile designer, Mudd became a professional photographer specializing in portraits. Active in Manchester from 1854-1870, Mudd is famous, not only for his carte-de-visite portraits, but also for his brilliant landscape photographs.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)
Muybridge was born Edward Muggeridge in London, and was the inventor of instantaneous photography. His best known work is his 'Animal Locomotion', a series of photographs showing the movement of animals and humans, produced between 1872 and 1885, and published by the University of Philadelphia in 1887. The series is said to have originated as the result of a bet made by Leyland Stanford, the railway millionaire. Stanford was sure that a running horse had all four hooves in the air, wagered 25,000 dollars and enlisted the aid of Muybridge to help him prove his point. Using twelve separate cameras spaced at intervals of twenty-seven inches, each camera having a shutter speed of 1/1000 second worked by a black thread stretched across the track, Muybridge was able to produce twelve photographs, each one showing a different stage of the horse's movement as it broke the thread, and proved Stanford right. In 1881, Muybridge experimented with an early type of motion picture projector, the 'zoopraxiscope'.

Nadar (pseudonym for Gaspard Felix Tournachon) (1820-1910)
Once a cartoonist, Nadar had the reputation of being France's finest portrait photographer. It was written of his portraits: 'They are too true to nature to please the sitters, even the most beautiful.' Nadar did not lionize his sitters, unlike Julia Margaret Cameron, and he rarely photographed women. One of the few women he did photograph was George Sand, the mistress of Chopin. In 1858, Nadar became internationally famous when he took the first photograph from a balloon and later, during the siege of Paris, commanded a balloon observation corps. In i860, using magnesium flares, Nadar photographed the catacombs of Paris.

Charles Negre (1820-1879)
Negre opened a portrait studio in Paris in 1850. He is noted not only for his calotype portraits and genre scenes, but also for his architectural photographs. Negre invented in 1854 a photogalvano-graphic process for the photomechanical reproduction of images. He was a founder member of the Societe Francaise de Photographie.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833)
Niepce was the inventor of the 'fixed image' and in 1826, after an exposure time of over eight hours, took the earliest known photograph from nature, a view from the upstairs window of his home near Gras in France. He called the process 'heliography'. Apart from his experiments with heliographs, Niepce also improved the camera, being the first to use bellows and an iris diaphragm in cameras he made himself.

William Notman (1826-1891)
Born in Britain, Notman went to Canada and from the mid 1850s took photographs of that country. Notman also photographed famous personalities of the period, including Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull. His work forms a valuable record of Canada's life, people and customs during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Timothy O"Sullivan (1840-1882)
A member of a team of photographers who photographed the American Civil War, O'Sullivan worked with Gardner and contributed photographs to the Photographic Sketch Book of the War. After the war he worked as a photographer for the Government, taking splendidly dispassionate photographs of the newly opened territories of the west.

Carlo Ponti (1823-93)
Inventor of the 'megalethoscope', a panoramic photograph viewer, Ponti was one of Italy's leading photographers, specializing in genre scenes and topographical views. Ponti published during the 1860s several albums of his photographs under the title Ricordo di Venezia.

William Lake Price (1810-1896)
Although Price produced photographs for eight years only, during that period his work was varied and considerable. Price's output ranged from cartes-de-visite and photographs of art objects to large combination prints, produced by cutting and pasting a number of positives together to form a single print. Combination prints were a photographic process that Price was among the first to popularize. In 1858, he published his Manual of Photographic Manipulation, which was an attempt to put forward his aesthetic ideas on photography.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875)
Of Swedish extraction, Rejlander was, with the possible exception of Peach Robinson, the best known exponent of 'Pictorial Photography'. In 1857 he produced his chef d'oeuvre 'The Two Ways of Life', a moralistic study of virtue and vice, which included what were, for the time, some rather daring nude studies. 'The Two Ways of Life', concocted from over 30 negatives, was bought by Queen Victoria for Prince Albert, who hung it in his study! Encouraged by this success, Rejlander produced many other combination prints and continued as a professional photographer until his death in 1875.

James Robertson (active 1852-1865)
Robertson started life as a designer of medals, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. During the 1850s, Robertson published views of Malta, Constantinople, and Athens. He is, however, best known as a photographer of the Crimean War. Later he photographed scenes in Palestine and Syria, and scenes in India after the Mutiny of 1857/58.

Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901)
An exponent of the 'Pictorial Photography' style, Robinson achieved overnight success at the age of 28 with his photograph 'Fading Away', a combination print made from five negatives. Robinson influenced photographic composition for almost half a century; but although he was a first rate technician, the artificiality of his method, the use of photomontage, paste, and scissors, to produce what appeared to be a single print, was later derided by the naturalistic photographers.

Olivier Francois Xavier Sarony (1820-1879)
Born in Canada but domiciled in England, Sarony was the most successful of the provincial photographers. He had a studio in Scarborough. In the 1870s he developed a new enlarging technique.

Camille Silvy (active 1857-1869)
Silvy was a French landscape and portrait photographer who worked in London. His most famous landscape photograph, a river scene (c.1860), was produced from two negatives, one of the river and one of the sky. Silvy was later noted for the elegance of his society portraits and was one of the best carte-de-visite photographers of the 1850s and 60s, even providing props or backgrounds relating to the sitter, if famous.

Samuel Smith (1802-1892)
Samuel Smith settled in Wisbech in 1847; he took up photography in 1852 and made hundreds of calotypes of local buildings and ships in the harbour. His photographs, which are among the last to be made by that process, are of interest not only as fine examples of calotypes, but also as a record of the changing appearance of the town and port of Wisbech in the mid-19th century.

Charles Soulier (1840-76)
A French landscape and alpine photographer, who was active during the second half of the 19th century, Soulier is best known for his photographs of the ruins of Paris after the Commune of 1871, taken in partnership with Ferrier.

Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894); Josiah John Hawes (1808-1901)
Southworth and Hawes were partners in Boston from 1844. Daguerreotypists, they made portraits of many famous Americans, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Longfellow and Daniel Webster. Southworth and Hawes were among the first American photographers to show scenes of real life in Boston.

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (1806-1894)
Stelzner opened a photographic portrait studio in Hamburg in 1842 in partnership with Hermann Biow. He is credited with taking the world's first press photographs: the ruins of the Alster district of Hamburg after the great fire of 1842.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
The leading pioneer of American art photography at the turn of the century, he was a founder member of the breakaway Photo-Secession, and co-founder with Edward Steichen (1879-1973) of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. He edited and published the journal Camera Work (1902-17).

Sir Benjamin Stone (1838-1914)
A rich man, Sir Benjamin Stone regarded photography as an ideal method of recording changing or vanishing customs and ceremonial events in Britain. Stone produced the first ever coronation photographs taken inside Westminster Abbey. In 1905 he published a two volume book Sir Benjamin Stone's Pictures. He gave the bulk of his personal collection of photographs to the Birmingham Reference Library.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)
The inventor of photography on paper, Talbot produced in 1835 what is thought to be the earliest photograph, a view of a window of his home at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire. Independently of Daguerre in France, Talbot had discovered a different photographic process, to which he gave the name 'calotypy'. While working at his photographic establishment in Reading, Talbot produced, in 1844-1846, the world's first books to be illustrated with photographs, The Pencil of Nature and Sun Pictures in Scotland. Later, in 1847, he made 66 calotypes of Spanish art objects for Sir W.S.Maxwell's Annals of the artists of Spain. In 1852, Talbot experimented with photoglyphic engraving, developing it into a photogravure process. He also produced a large number of calotypes. An acclaimed pioneer of graphic art, Talbot died at Lacock Abbey in 1877, having lived to see the introduction of the dry plate process and thus the beginnings of photography as it is practised today.

John Thomson (1837-1921)
As well as being a photographer, John Thomson was a keen explorer and published, usually in book form, landscape and ethnographical photographs of China, Cambodia, and the Straits of Malacca. In England, Thomson produced, in 1877, documentary photographs of London street life.

Walter Bentley Woodbury (1834-1885)
Best known as the inventor of the 'woodburytype', a photographic printing process, Woodbury was born in Manchester and at the age of fifteen emigrated to Australia. In 1855, he became a professional photographer, and in 1859 visited Java and produced many topographical photographs of that island. Woodbury settled in England in 1863 and devoted the rest of his working life to photographic invention.

David Wilkie Wynfield (1837-1887)
Wynfield was an artist and amateur photographer, who specialized in close-up portrait photographs of famous Victorians. He produced many fine studies, which were much admired by Julia Margaret Cameron, whom he directly influenced and whose style is very similar to his.

Other Artists

For biographical details of other fine artists, see the following resources:

• Greatest Visual Artists (up to 1850)
• Modern Artists (1850-present)
• Greatest Architects (c.1400-2000)

• For more about nineteenth century arts and crafts, see: Homepage.
• For the evolution of the visual arts, see: History of Art.

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