Click on all the illustrations except the last, to see larger versions and find out more about them. The last one, by kind permission of the Royal Academy of Arts, can also be seen on its own page, here. — JB
Self-portrait, 1860s, © National Portrait Gallery, London.
avid Wilkie Wynfield (1837-1887) was an important pioneering Victorian photographer and today is as highly regarded for his photographs as for his paintings. In the 1860s Wynfield produced the photographs for which he is best known, a series of images of contemporary artists, both establishment figures and young progressive artists, portrayed mostly in historical dress. That he chose to dress his sitters in historical costume is perhaps not surprising because in the 1860s his paintings were generally historical genre scenes set in medieval or Renaissance times. Many of the photographs he produced at this time were subsequently released for sale in March 1864 under the title The Studio: A Collection of Photographic Portraits of Living Artists, taken in the style of the Old Masters, by an Amateur. His work was a major influence on perhaps the best-known British photographer of the nineteenth century, Julia Margaret Cameron. In a letter to the eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel, Cameron wrote: "I have had one lesson from the great Amateur photographer Mr. Wynfield & I consult him in correspondence whenever I am in difficulty" (Hacking 9). Cameron acknowledged Wynfield as the most dominant influence on her work stating that to "his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts & indeed consequently all my success." Wynfield's influence is clearly borne out by the similarities in their styles.
It is not known exactly when Wynfield took up photography but around 1860 he became acquainted with Frederick Richard Pickersgill, who was not only a painter but also a novice photographer. Pickersgill was later to become the son-in-law of the well-known photographer Roger Fenton. In 1861 it appears Wynfield began his series of his artistic contemporaries and in December 1863 he registered for copyright ten portraits of artists in costume. He exhibited his work in 1864 at the Graphic Society and the South London Photographic Society. Juliet Hacking speculates that Wynfield published his series The Studio anonymously because "His reputation as a painter would have been irreparably damaged if he was thought to have used photography to make his compositions" (30). Be tht as it may, people in the know seem to have quickly figured out who the photographer was.
Two portraits © National Portrait Gallery, London. Left: Wynfield's, of Frederick Richard Pickersgill, c. 1863. Right: Cameron's, of Henry Thoby Prinsep, 1866.
Diane Waggoner has commented that the work of Wynfield and Cameron overcame what were considered the artistic limitations of photography for portraiture:
Wynfield and Cameron provoked an outpouring of commentary when they rejected the assumption that photographic portraits should always depict the subject with the utmost clarity. Representing their sitters partly out of focus and manipulating light to achieve softness of detail and breadth of tone, they utilized the technical abilities of their medium to compete with painted representations, expanding the definition of what made a good photographic likeness. Some condemned Wynfield and Cameron's artistic images for not being appropriately photographic, while others admired them for overcoming the medium's widely perceived aesthetic limitations. [96]
When Wynfield's collection of artist photographs, The Studio, appeared it was appreciated for its revolutionary nature by a critic for The Illustrated London News who praised the artist for aligning his work with that of the Old Masters:
To the eye of the artist the rigid sharpness and stark precision of photography (especially when it pervades every part of a photograph) is its greatest artistic defect. It is true that if we regard a photograph merely as a production of optical and chemical science, definiteness of detail throughout is the measure of success. But this is not what persons of artistic feeling want or require in most cases, especially in representations of the face. Nevertheless, photographers persist in giving to portraits a deathlike stillness and a universal distinctness beyond the power of fevered vision to realize. A photographer's grand aim is to get everything into an "artificial focus," which is widely different from that of the human eye, – or, rather, eyes, for it is owing to the phenomena of binocular vision that we derive so much softer and more agreeable an impression from Nature than photography gives us. Everyone must recollect how charming are some early photographs, and many by amateurs. Well, this is because of what professional photographists call their "focal distortion" but which same distortion artists think consonant with certain eternal laws, both of nature and art. It seemed to require that an artist should be the first to work in photography upon such principles as we have indicated. And at last we find that an artist – Mr. Wynfield – has actually produced a set of photographs which are intentionally and confessedly out of focus. To attempt to describe these photographs we will not; but we must maintain that, if they do not, they ought to revolutionize photographic portraiture, if not other branches of the art. The series consists of the set of large bust portraits of popular artists, such as Phillip, Faed, Calderon, &c.; and each artist is dressed after the manner of the subjects of the great portrait-painters, Italian and Flemish. The result is a set of photographs which resemble copies from very choice portraits by Titian, Rembrandt, Vandyke, and other old masters, but which possess greater softness, lifelike animation, apparent power of movement, and breadth of light and shade than any photographic copies of pictures or studies from life we have ever seen. The publishers of the series are Messrs. Herring and Co., of Regent-street. [275]
Unfortunately this publication did not prove to be a financial success and after only about six months following its publication Wynfield withdrew it from public circulation. Despite high praise for his photographs by some critics, the Photographic Society of London rebuffed Wynfield's work.
Philip Hermogenes Calderon, 1863, © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Tom Taylor in assessing Wynfield's career to date in The Portfolio in 1871 pointed out Wynfield's acumen as a photographer: "Mr. Wynfield is a very skilful photographer, and has produced a remarkable series of portraits of contemporary artists, in which artistic feeling is shown in the arrangement of pose, the treatment of light and shadow, and the choice of appropriate costume. The taste of the last accompaniment may be questioned. It gives something of the masquerade character to heads which, in themselves, are one of the most valuable contributions to the Art-records of our time" (87).
Hacking has noted that over seventy different portraits of over fifty sitters by Wynfield have been preserved by British photographic collections alone. She felt that "both the consistency of treatment and the number of artists depicted suggest that the portraits form a related project" (11). Wynfield, it appears, considered these artists to be "united in their devotion to the advancement of art: for these artists individual fame is glory for all. Not a mechanical limner but a Renaissance man, the artist (of whatever shading) is the equal of nobility in his culture and learning…According to The Studio, the artists of Britain were not seeking fame for its own sake but to make their nation once again a significant force in the arts" (Hacking 19).
Wynfield did not exclusively photograph artists nor were the sitters always posed in historical costume. In other photographs, such as his portraits of the French artists Edouard Manet and Alphonse Legros, artists are seen in contemporary dress. The artists he photographed included not only painters but also architects, like his striking portrait of William Swinden Barber, and graphic artists like Charles Keene and George Du Maurier. What is remarkable about his series is that Wynfield chose not only older well-established artists like Alfred Elmore, John Phillip, and Richard Ansdell but also young artists at the beginning of their careers like Simeon Solomon. He included artists who would become amongst the most prominent artists of their day such as John Everett Millais, Frederic Leighton, William Holman Hunt, and G. F. Watts.
Three portraits, also © National Portrait Gallery, London. (a) John Everett Millais, 1860s. (b) Frederic Leighton, 1860s. (c) G.F. Watts, 1863.
Wynfield's choice of historical dress for his subjects may have been an attempt to equate his artistic contemporaries with their predecessors amongst the Old Masters. Hacking believes that the model that Wynfield had in mind when he created his series The Studio was Van Dyck's series of engraved portraits of his contemporaries entitled The Iconography (Hacking 17). Hacking quite rightly points out:
There can be little doubt that Wynfield's portraits were intended to function on one level at least as psychological portraits…Wynfield's portrait series highlights the psychological dilemmas engendered both by the condition of the Victorian age and by the artist's own condition: the transition from youth to maturity, nonconformity to conformity, faith to reason. When Wynfield's sitters assume meditative, melancholic expressions, look into the far distance or deep into the camera, the artist appears as both gifted and damned; gifted with the talents of his noble predecessors and damned by the awakening to the nature of the human comedy which attended the transition to both physical and artistic maturity. [22-23]
Mary Stephen Smith, the niece of Wynfield's friend and fellow artist W. F. Yeames, noted the way in which Wynfield's photographs differed from conventional photographic portraits of the mid-Victorian age:
So accustomed are we to the beautiful photography of to-day that we can hardly realize what an able pioneer he was in the photographic work of his time. The camera was practically in its infancy, and its productions consisted chiefly of cartes-de-visite of ladies in stiff crinolines holding long-handled baskets of artificial flowers, and gentlemen with side-whiskers, standing by marble pillars, one peg-top leg twined elegantly round the other, and a thunderstorm venting its fury from behind a heavily tasselled curtain in the background. Working for his private satisfaction, Wynfield would take large portrait studies of friends whose faces interested him, invariably arranging some sort of head-dress or costume which he fancied suited the type of face… His method was to adjust the camera slightly out of focus, which softened and did away with the stereotyped hard look of the professional photographs of the day. He also gave his plates a special preparation. [152-53]
Simeon Solomon, c.1860s, © Royal Academy
of Arts, London (note: non-downloadable).
Wynfield's portraits were albumen prints produced from wet-collodion negatives on plates that measured 8 x 6". Subjects were portrayed in confined spaces with backgrounds comprised of darkness and light in order to emphasize their faces and their historical costumes. Wynfield disregarded the normal conventions of Victorian photography by using experimental techniques that included soft focus, close-up views, and strong contrasts of light and shade to create chiaroscuro. Hacking has described his working methods in this way:
Wynfield invariably posed his sitter in front of a background divided into indistinct areas of light and dark arranged in order to achieve a contrast to the white of the face and the dark of the hair. The costume worn by the sitter was also arranged to create contrasting areas of light and dark…Wynfield's use of an extremely narrow depth-of-field enabled him to work with chiaroscuro; areas of light and dark blend or blur into one another creating a fusion of background and subject. The scattering of light rays across the glass plate effected by the use of an open aperture ensured that there were no dead shadows in this or any other of Wynfield's portraits. The "apparent power of movement" found in a number of Wynfield's portraits derives from the combination of the long exposures during which the sitter might move, and the narrow depth-of-field which suggests to the viewer's eye that the head of the sitter is about to move into the plane of focus. [17]Waggoner also commented on Wynfield's revolutionary photographic techniques: "Wynfield framed each of his subjects from the chest upward; positioned them close to the picture plane; and set them in a shallow space with few background details visible. Their faces are typically in focus, the light softly modeling their features, while their hands and costumes, on a different plane, are often less clearly defined… The softening effects of chiaroscurro in these photographs, coupled with the sitters' composed, meditative expressions, convey a psychological intensity and sense of physical depth reminiscent of old master paintings. [96]
Bibliography
"Fine Arts." The Illustrated London News XLIV (10 March 1864): 275.
Hacking, Juliet: Princes of Victorian Bohemia. London: Prestel, 2000.
Stephen Smith, Mary H. Art And Anecdote. Recollections of William Frederick Yeames, R.A. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1927. 152-53.
Taylor, Tom. "English Painters of the Present day. XXVI. – D. W. Wynfield." The Portfolio II (1871): 84-87.
Waggoner, Diane. The Pre-Raphaelite Lens. British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2010. 94-105.
Wynfield, David Wilkie. The Studio: A Collection of Photographic Portraits of Living Artists, taken in the style of the Old Masters, by an Amateur. London: Messrs. Herring and Co., 1864.
Created 16 December 2023