| Description | Hollyer, Frederick (1838–1933), photographer and art publisher, was born on 17 June 1838 at 34 Penton Place, Clerkenwell, London, the youngest son of Samuel Hollyer, assistant sealer to the first Lord Brougham, the lord chancellor, and his wife, Mary Ann Hudson. Like his father and two of his brothers, he was trained as a reproductive engraver in mezzotint, and he engraved two paintings by Edwin Landseer, The Shepherd's Grave (1868) and The Shepherd's Chief Mourner (1869). He began his career in photography about 1860 and was elected a member of the Photographic Society of London in 1865. He was also a member of the Solar Club, founded by G. Wharton Simpson and H. P. Robinson in 1865. In the 1860s he photographed a series of drawings by Simeon Solomon, A Dream of Love in Sleep. In this early work he used wet collodion glass-plate negatives and printed on unglazed salted paper, but he began printing in platinum as soon as the process became available in the mid-1870s.
In 1873 Hollyer moved from Kentish Town in north-west London to a studio in Pembroke Square, Kensington. He was commissioned in the 1870s to photograph the paintings of Frederick Leighton; he also photographed many of those of Edward Burne-Jones in different stages of production. With its delicacy of tone and matt paper surface, the platinotype produced facsimiles of drawings by artists such as Burne-Jones so perfect as to be later mistaken for originals. He soon became well known for these art reproductions of the work of other contemporary English artists such as Albert Moore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Frederick Sandys, and George Richmond, as well as the old masters.
Hollyer's platinum prints of paintings are said to have been so subtly evocative as to have suggested modifications to the painters. G. F. Watts credited them as largely responsible for bringing to the notice of the general public both his own work and that of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. At the turn of the century his platinum reproductions were praised as equalling the mezzotint in richness but surpassing it in fidelity to the original and thereby preserving the individual expression of the painter. Catalogues of ‘platinotype reproductions of pictures’ exhibited at Hollyer's studio and later at the Dudley Gallery in London were issued regularly from 1893 to 1911, and again after 1918. These art reproductions, some as large as 40 inches by 30, are now found in art collections worldwide.
For thirty years, beginning in 1882, Hollyer's studio was reserved on Mondays for portraits, which he considered to be his creative work. In 1892 he became a member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood, a group which aspired to artistic photography and held exhibitions independent of the Photographic Society. Most of his work exhibited at the salons of the Linked Ring consisted of portraits or figure studies. He married Mary (b. 1838/9) and by 1906 their eldest son, Frederick Thomas Hollyer, had joined the business, with a series of photographic reproductions of portrait paintings from The Hague. In 1913 Hollyer retired from his studio at 8–9 Pembroke Square, Kensington, and left his two sons, Frederick Thomas and Arthur Samuel, in charge of the business. In 1920 he compiled for his daughter Eleanor three small albums of platinum portraits, of prominent artists, writers, and statesmen from the previous decades of his career—including William Morris, W. B. Yeats, Lord Kelvin, and General Smuts—which are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Frederick Hollyer died on 21 November 1933 in Blewbury, Berkshire, at Meers Parcel, the home of his son.
Please note this biography was taken from Anne Hammond, ‘Hollyer, Frederick (1838–1933)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/58918, accessed 14 Nov 2013]
Album contains 95 mounted photographs of portraits by G. F. Watts. The sitters names are recorded benath the photograph in an unidentified hand. Upper cover of binding embossed: ' G. F. Watts, R. A. Portraits, Fredk. Hollyer, Pembroke Square'. Written in pencil on the front end paper is written 'Bt by Christopher Gibbs in Feversham and presented by him Dec 1975'.
[Page numbers do not run consistently, numbers are missing or in wrong order, this has been reflected in the title description for each individual page.]
[Frederick Hollyer is also mentioned in the GFW/1 series: GFW/1/9/10, GFW/1/10/2, GFW/1/13/8, GFW/1/13/30] |