by Gerald Boerner
Today, we take a look backwards again into the 19th centruy. Frederick Hollyer was trained as an engraver, but worked with photography, especially within his small circle of artist and other friends. His work illustrates the capabilities of the process as the technology was still being developed. His grounding in the reproduction and printing industry gave voice to the notion that photography was not just for art, but also for preparing images for communication. GLB
“…Hollyer made photographic reproductions of paintings by Leighton, Watts and other leading artists.”
— Victoria and Albert Museum
“Very truly and modestly put, Mr. Hollyer, but I am afraid you have something more than an inclination to evade the real point at issue…”
— Horace Townsend
“Don’t for one moment understand me to mean that that fatal crime of touching and retouching negative or print is or has been laid to my charge.”
— Horace Townsend
“I really don’t know, but to tell the honest truth I have got rather tired of the very words ‘art and artistic,’ and at times am inclined to say rude things about those who insist so strenuously that they are artists…”
— Horace Townsend
“I found Mr. Frederick Hollyer, a sturdy, broad-shouldered, good-humoured and good-looking man of middle age, who comes nearer to the definition of artist-photographer than any other man in England.”
— Victoria and Albert Museum
“When, not so very many years ago, photography came into being, the marvellous results which were produced by the very earliest photographers, caused an exaggerated opinion to prevail as to its purely artistic future.”
— Horace Townsend
“This is the moment of exposure. Consider on the other hand though, at how many other points the personal equation enters into our problem. First there is the focusing…; then there is the development; thirdly, there is the manipulation of the print from the developed negative.”
— Horace Townsend
“In other arts, and especially the subsidiary, it is their very limitations which the craftsmen turn with instinctive recognition to their own advantage. If this principle were only to be recognised and honestly lived up to by photographers in general, we should have results which would be better art, because they would be better photographs.”
— Horace Townsend
Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the sites which do not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting are outside of copyright protection and in the public domain. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.
GLB
Frederick Hollyer (1838 – 1933)
Frederick Hollyer was an English photographer and engraver known for his photographic reproductions of paintings and drawings, particularly those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and for portraits of literary and artistic figures of late Victorian and Edwardian London.
Hollyer was the youngest son of Samuel Hollyer (1797-1883), a line engraver, fine art publisher, collector of watercolors, and Deputy Sealer at the Court of Chancery until 1853, when the post was abolished. His brothers Christopher Charles Hollyer (1836-1874), and Samuel Hollyer Jr. (1826-1919) also worked as engravers. Frederick Hollyer’s first published works were mezzotint engravings of two paintings by Edwin Landseer published by J. McQueen in 1869.
Photographic career
John Ruskin, 1894
Hollyer became interested in photography about 1860. He made albumen and carbon prints, but his preferred medium was the platinotype or platinum print process, admired for its permanence and great tonal range. Under the patronage of Frederic Leighton, Hollyer began to photograph paintings and drawings in the 1870s. Artists whose work he published include Edward Burne-Jones, George Frederic Watts, Simeon Solomon, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Of his work with the Pre-Raphaelites, The Times noted that:
[H]e may be said to have done as much for their popularity by reproducing their work as Ruskin did with the pen. His modest premises in Pembroke Square, Kensington, became a place of pilgrimage for everybody who was in the aesthetic movement.
With Burne-Jones, whom he met in the early seventies, and Watts, his collaboration —for it amounted to that—was particularly close. He photographed their work at different stages—the prints often suggesting modifications to the artists—and his collection of negatives must contain some interesting records of early states. Rossetti, Albert Moore, and Sir W.B. Richmond were other artists whose work was made familiar to the public through Hollyer’s reproductions. In workmanship he was extremely fastidious, giving personal attention to every stage of the process, so that the final result was not so much a photograph of a painting as a translation of its qualities into photographic terms.
Walter Crane, 1886
Hollyer’s photographs of drawings were particularly successful; printed on high-quality paper, they were often mistaken for originals. One of the most popular was a study of three heads by Burne-Jones for The Masque of Cupid.
Hollyer also took studio portraits and specialized in interior and exterior photos of houses. For 30 years, he reserved Mondays for portrait photography in his Pembroke Square studio. His sitters included the artists Walter Crane, William Morris, G. F. Watts, and Burne-Jones; the writers John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw; and the actresses Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry. Hollyer eschewed the formal poses of most studio portraiture of his day; in an 1899 interview in The Photogram he said:
Georgiana Burne-Jones, c. 1882
The one thing needful for photographers, if they are ever to take a position as artists, is general culture, which includes the study of the work of artists of all other classes. If every photographer would make a real study, for two or three years, of the hands of his sitters, portraiture would take an immense step forward. But the photographer must cease attempting to pose hands and make them pose themselves by giving them some congenial occupation . . The photographer who has met a man half a dozen times should know with absolute certainty what is the most characteristic pose and lighting for his face . . . I think it would be a most useful thing, even from the business point of view, if every photographer would resolve that for every negative made for profit there should be another made for love. The greatest good of the Photographic Salon has been in showing that the best professional photographers could do some of the finest amateur work.
Burne-Jones’s Studio, 1887
Hollyer joined the Royal Photographic Society 1865 and became a Fellow in 1895, but was also involved in The Linked Ring, a society formed in to support pictorialism in opposition to the Photographic Society. He was a member of the Solar Club and became one of the Founder Members of the Professional Photographers’ Association in 1901.
Today, Hollyer is remembered chiefly for his photographs of Burne-Jones, William Morris, and their circle. Under British copyright law, Hollyer’s photographs are now public domain as he died more than 70 years ago.
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Frederick Hollyer can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Hollyer
Also see…
Interview by Horace Townsend: Frederick Hollyer…
http://www.hollyer.info/fredint.php
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