[‘Cathedrals &c.’] [An album of 55 mounted albumen photographic plates, 1 photogalvanograph plate and 37 mounted engravings.]

Notes

An attractive collection of images of 21 English ecclesiastical buildings, mostly albumen prints, with examples from Francis Frith, James Valentine, Sylvester Parry and Carl Norman alongside many unattributed photographs. Augmenting the photographs are 37 engravings and floorplans taken from 'Architectural and Picturesque Illustrations of the Cathedral Churches of England and Wales' by Benjamin Winkles; some of these are dated 1836. The outlier in this collection is an image of York Minster printed by the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Company in 1856 using the Photogalvanograph process of electrically engraving a photographic image onto a printing plate, which was invented in 1854. The Photo-Galvano-Graphic Company was formed two years later by Paul Pretsch, the inventor of the process, with Roger Fenton as chief photographer. This plate is taken from their 'Photographic Art Treasures' series (1856-7), the first published reproductions of photographs (as distinct from pasted-in photographic prints), the fascicules of which were advertised on their wrappers as ushering in the 'new era in art'.
None of the photographic prints are dated and due to the unchanging nature of classical cathedral architecture, precision is difficult, but they are consistent with an origin in the late 19th century, a little later than the dated examples. Frith, Valentine and Parry all began production of these sorts of views in the 1860s, with Norman beginning a few years later around 1880. The unsigned prints appear, like their identified brethren, to be commercial views. Most of the images are wholly devoid of human life, but a few exterior views show diminutive pedestrians in Victorian garb; a photograph of Ripon Cathedral here shows a sharp gravestone with a legible date of 1862. They are grouped by building, with many of the pages bordered and lettered, presumably by the compiler, in a naive Gothic style. It has been assembled with some care and presents a good selection of the works of several Victorian photographers on comparable subjects, unusual to find together in a contemporary collection in such quantity.