Sarah Angelina Acland: First Lady of Colour Photography by Giles Hudson, and: The Photography of Victorian Scotland by Roddy Simpson (review)

A 1907 portrait shows an attractive woman seated demurely in a doorway. Wearing a deep blue skirt, a lighter blue shawl over a cream blouse, and a hat extravagantly decorated with pale pink roses, her dress sense is enhanced by the deep pinks and reds of the potted geraniums beside her, and the Boston creeper on the pillar behind, just starting to make its autumnal turn. This could easily be a painting by William Orpen or William Nicholson. Yet in fact, this is—so far as is known—the earliest Autochrome photograph ever exhibited by a woman in public: Sarah Angelina Acland showed this likeness of her goddaughter Maggie Brinton at the Oxford Camera Club exhibition in March 1908, under the title A Portrait Outdoors, where it was awarded—understandably—a red rosette.

This image graces the cover of Giles Hudson’s excellent Sarah Angelina Acland: First Lady of Colour Photography, and quite apart from being a striking picture in its own right, it exemplifies many of Acland’s strengths and interests as a photographer. She was a notable taker of portraits, able to fulfill the late Victorian desire to see the character that lies behind surface likeness. This is as apparent in her image of Robert Davis, the Oxford station master for the Great Western Railway, as it is in the portraits of such celebrities as William Gladstone, or the heads of Oxford colleges. Acland took several particularly poignant pictures of her childhood drawing master, John Ruskin, at Brantwood in his old age. Occasionally her images are less formal, like that of the round and jolly Isambard Brunel, Chancellor of the Diocese of Ely, and son of the famous engineer. This picture was taken with a pocket Kodak, and used by Acland in a lecture on home portraiture to show that excellent likenesses may be achieved even with toys.

Acland was endlessly experimental with cameras, lenses, and methods. The Autochrome of Maggie Brinton was not her first venture into color photography: she had previously, at the turn of the century, tried the Kromaz and Krōmskōp methods (both involved making separate exposures through red, green, and blue filters, then looking simultaneously at all three negatives with a special viewing instrument), and the Sanger Shepherd Process. This complicated technique involved taking three separate exposures on one plate—each through a different chromatic filter—printing the red negative onto glass, and the blue and green ones onto transparent celluloid that was then stained magenta and yellow, before all three were varnished, and combined together in one lantern slide. At their best, the results were exquisite. Acland produced, among other images, a Crimson Rambler rose blooming in New College Gardens in 1900 (she excelled at flower photography, and used her early skills in botanical drawing to good effect); bright flowerbeds and locals in Gibraltar, where her brother was stationed and where she also experimented with an early telephoto lens, pointing it across the strait to North Africa; and—albeit slightly blotchy—the first color photo ever taken of Oxford, of evening light in Broad Street. Remarkably, all these images were made before the invention of the Autochrome in 1907, the date that has become lazily identified with the birth of color photography.

Sarah Angelina Acland consists of a very helpful introduction, followed by the reproduction of some 220 of her works in catalogue format. Over a thousand of her images are in the collections of the Bodleian Library and Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science. The introductory essay positions Acland, daughter of the eminent Oxford scientist and patron of the arts Henry Acland, in relation both to the university society in which she and her family moved, and to the history of photography. Indeed...