Included in the display are studies of British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, painter Sir John Everett Millais, Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, actresses including Mary Anderson and Marion Hood and the renowned Studd brothers, the Victorian gentleman cricketers.
The firm of Elliott and Fry, founded in 1863 and active until 1963, was one of the most important in the history of studio portraiture in London. Opened by Joseph John Elliott and Clarence Edmund Fry their first premises were a series of studios at 55 Baker Street. H. Baden Pritchard in his 1882 book The Photographic Studios of Europe records his tour of their extensive galleries, where the predominant decoration consisted of important contemporary art works which relaxed his sitters before their actual photographs were taken. Posed in the naturally lit "glass-room", they could choose from a selection of fifteen painted backgrounds. Sittings were charged at a guinea, which entitled the sitter to 18 cartes-de-visite (visiting card size) or six of the larger 'cabinet portrait' photographs. This was twice the sum for the best theatre seats and was deemed by many followers of fashion as 'an amusement a la mode.'
The firm employed a variety of operators who took the photographs and these included Francis Henry Hart and Alfred James Philpott in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Elliott's son Ernest C.Elliott compiled a fascinating album of 50 British sportsmen; Fifty Leaders of British Sport, published in 1904, while in the later history of the firm, eminent photographers such as Walter Benington, Herbert Lambert and William Flowers undertook important sittings.
The studio premises and historic archive were destroyed by enemy action in 1942 and these surviving exhibition prints, from before 1914, are the only surviving records of the earlier years. In its centenary year, 1963, the firm was taken over by Bassano to become Bassano and Vandyk. The main part of that archive was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in the 1970s, but it is only now that the Elliott and Fry material has re-emerged and through this generous donation has been re-united with the rest of the collection.
The exhibition will be on view through 22 July 2007. -- www.npg.org.uk
Posted March 3rd, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
