Giles Hudson
The announcement of the acquisition by the Ashmolean Museum of John Everett Millais’s celebrated portrait of John Ruskin marks a new chapter in the history of a painting that not only has an important place in the grand narrative of the history of art, but also a more private history, through one of Ruskin’s pupils, the photographer Sarah Angelina Acland. Bequeathed by Ruskin to her father Henry Wentworth Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, for three decades the portrait hung over Miss Acland’s writing desk in her home opposite the Sheldonian Theatre. As well as treasuring the painting as a likeness of her close friend and mentor in artistic matters, in the late 1890s Miss Acland also used the work as a test subject in her experiments in orthochromatic photography, which she pursued in the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites, around whom she had grown up.
In Oxford the earliest surviving photograph albums to feature portraits in any number date from the late 1850s and usually belonged to undergraduates. Alongside clerics, students in caps and gowns, and the boater-clad crews of college “eight-oars”, these albums frequently contain more unusual subjects: men in military uniform, complete with rifles and swords. Read more of this post
Arthur Burrows, or “Uncle Arthur” to his listeners, has an important place in broadcasting history as the first person to read the news on the BBC. Less well-known is his interest in photography, which was nurtured in the Oxford Camera Club.
Press Release:
Oxford, September 2012 – A richly illustrated book from Bodleian Library Publishing on the life, career, and pictures of pioneering photographic artist Sarah Angelina Acland sheds new light on the history of colour photography.
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matters photographical 