(2) At the age of 16, his education complete, things did not get much better. 'If I have a nightmare,' Frith wrote, 'I dream of going back to school'. At the age of ten, Frith was sent to boarding school near Birmingham, where he remained for six years initiating the beginning of a period of bleakness in his life.
It can be argued that the dominant thematic and compositional themes evident in his work reference back to these early memories and their emblematic significance when one takes into account that despite the miraculous achievements of the Industrial Revolution, few examples of man-made industry are represented in his work. These early memories of an Edenic countryside are symbolic of the well-rehearsed notions of youth and innocence, where the pastoral was esteemed over the urban, promulgated by Victorian Romantic poets with whom Frith was surely familiar. (1) These religious convictions and Frith's lifelong commitment and identification with his faith were to inform every aspect of his public life and work.īy Frith's own account, the Derbyshire of his childhood was a 'romantic idyll'. His father, Francis Frith Sr., a wine merchant, descended from a long line of Quakers, and although his mother was from 'outside' the faith, she embraced her husband's people, with Frith's unpublished autobiographical manuscript presenting a devout Quaker (even by late Victorian standards of piety) and true believer. was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, on 7th October 1822 into a solidly middle class Quaker household. But more recently, scholars have been revisiting Frith's place in the history of photography, placing him within the larger context of the vexing questions on photography's mixed parentage, simultaneously a new art and a scientific manifestation.įrancis Frith Jr. In Frith's case, this was further complicated by his role as the founder of the largest photographic printing business in England. In later years, photographic history tended to neglect those photographers such as Frith, whose work veered towards the topographic, diminishing them as merely transcribers of reality. Targeted towards a market that would later adopt the postcard as the ideal format for its needs, the 'Universal Series' forms a bridge between the initial low volume craft/art production associated with photography of the 1850s and the more commercial mass production work of the latter half of the century.ĭuring the 1850s and 1860s, Francis Frith was one of England's most celebrated photographers. These developments changed and expanded the audience for photography and Frith's operation was well-prepared to provide for it and, it can be argued, worked to develop it employing a diverse range of publishing channels. Mounted on brown card, with the place name and stock number usually handwritten on the print itself, they were most probably used as place-markers within the company's filing system, allowing for easy retrieval of stocks of unmounted prints.įrith's growing business coincided with many technological developments taking place within the field of photography.
The images that make up the V&A Frith 'Universal Series' are file prints acquired from F. In addition to hiring his own photographers, Frith also bought the negative stocks of established photographers such as Roger Fenton and Francis Bedford. Photographers associated with Frith's 'Universal Series' include Robert Napper (Andalusia), Frank Mason Good (Egypt) and Frederick William Sutton and Hugo Lewis Pearson (Japan). stamp were not taken by Frith himself, but by one of his travelling employees. It is now known that nearly all of the works bearing the F. Images such as these were highly desirable throughout the 1850s and 1860s.
#Henry pope art view at chepstow castle 1890 archive
This image is part of the V&A's Francis Frith 'Universal Series' archive which consists of over 4000 whole-plate albumen prints predominantly of historical and topographical sites. He also established what was to become the largest photographic printing business in England. Francis Frith was one of the most successful commercial photographers from the 1850s and 1860s.
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