David Roberts

Book Description

London: Published by Lloyd Brothers & Co., circa 1858. Albumen photograph mounted on card as issued. Very good condition apart from some light soiling and minor foxing in the margins. 14 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches. 19 1/4 x 14 3/16 inches. A stunning image from the series "Portraits of Eminent British Artists" by one of the leading figures of early Victorian photography. David Roberts (1796-1864) was born at Stockbridge near Edinburgh, and at the early age of 10 apprenticed to Gavin Buego, a house painter. He continued to work for Buego after his apprenticeship was completed, carrying out work on imitation stonework and paneling at Scone Palace and Abercairney Abbey. By 1818, Roberts had become an assistant scene-painter at the Pantheon Theater in Edinburgh, moving on to work in theatres in Glasgow and, in late 1821, Drury Lane theatre in London, where he worked with Clarkson Stanfield. Both artists exhibited at the Society of British Artists, Royal Academy, and British Institution, and by 1830, Roberts was firmly established as a topographical artist and was therefore able to give up his theatre work. In these early years, he toured the continent and Scotland, and in 1832-33, he visited Spain. In 1838, he made plans for a journey to the Near East, inspired by a love of artistic adventure. Departing in August 1839 for Alexandria, he spent the remaining part of the year in Cairo visiting the numerous tombs and sites. In February of the following year, he set out to cross the desert for the Holy Land by way of Suez, Mount Sinai and Petra arriving in Gaza, and then on to Jerusalem. He concluded his tour by spending several months visiting the biblical sites of the Holy Land, and finally returned to England at the end of 1839. The drawings of his tour were submitted to F. G. Moon in 1840, who arranged to bring out a work illustrative of Scripture History, paying Roberts £3,000 for the copyright of the sketches and for his labor in supervising Louis Haghe's lithography. Both the exhibition of his original watercolours and the subsequent published work were an immediate success and confirmed his reputation as an architectural and landscape artist of the highest order. An architectural and topographical artist by training, William Lake Price was an innovator in the field of mid- nineteenth century photography, who revolutionized the combination printing technique. He was a pupil of the eminent architect Augustus Charles Pugin (1762-1832) and frequently exhibited his paintings and watercolours at the Royal Academy and Old Watercolour Society before taking up photography in 1854. He also published a number of illustrated books such as Interiors and Exteriors in Venice (1843). Despite his success as a painter, Price began to avidly pursue his interest in photography in the mid-1850s and joined the London Photographic Society and Photographic Exchange Club of London. He became active in the field during a key period in the evolution of British photography, which was still a relatively new science, into a commercial art form. He truly exemplified the growing phenomenon of the artist/photographer. His first photographs were primarily genre scenes, one of which appeared in the society's Photographic Album for the Year 1855. He also photographed historical and literary scenes as well as numerous portraits, many of which were published in an ambitious 1858 collection entitled Portraits of Eminent British Artists. That same year, he published Manual of Photographic Manipulation, a practical, instructional work most likely intended for the amateur photographer, another recently developed phenomenon made possible by Frederick Scott Archer's introduction of the easily mastered collodion process in 1851. Price's photographic works were well received by the public, and he soon became a chief proponent of the combination printing technique, which he innovatively used to produce stunning compositions. He also experimented with stereoscopic pictures. His photographs can be found today in many collections, including The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Photographic Collection of the Royal Academy of Art, London. Cf. Dictionary of National Biography.

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