Frederick Hollyer was an English
photographer and
engraverEngraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
known for his photographic reproductions of paintings and drawings, particularly those of the
Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodThe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
, and for portraits of literary and artistic figures of late
VictorianThe Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
and
EdwardianThe Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910.The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son Edward marked the end of the Victorian era...
London.
Frederick Hollyer was an English
photographer and
engraverEngraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
known for his photographic reproductions of paintings and drawings, particularly those of the
Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodThe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
, and for portraits of literary and artistic figures of late
VictorianThe Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
and
EdwardianThe Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910.The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son Edward marked the end of the Victorian era...
London.
Family
Hollyer was the youngest son of Samuel Hollyer (1797–1883), a line engraver, fine art publisher, collector of watercolours, and Deputy Sealer at the
Court of ChanceryThe Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid the slow pace of change and possible harshness of the common law. The Chancery had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including trusts, land law, the administration of the estates of...
until 1853, when the post was abolished. His brothers Christopher Charles Hollyer (1836–1874), and Samuel Hollyer Jr. (1826–1919) also worked as engravers. Frederick Hollyer's first published works were
mezzotintMezzotint is a printmaking process of the intaglio family, technically a drypoint method. It was the first tonal method to be used, enabling half-tones to be produced without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple...
engravings of two paintings by Edwin Landseer published by J. McQueen in 1869.
Photographic career
Hollyer became interested in photography about 1860. He made
albumenThe albumen print, also called albumen silver print, was invented in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, and was the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative...
and
carbonA carbon print is a photographic print with an image consisting of pigmented gelatin, rather than of silver or other metallic particles suspended in a uniform layer of gelatin, as in typical black-and-white prints, or of chromogenic dyes, as in typical photographic color prints.In the original...
prints, but his preferred medium was the
platinotype or platinum print process, admired for its permanence and great tonal range. Under the patronage of
Frederic LeightonFrederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton PRA , known as Sir Frederic Leighton, Bt, between 1886 and 1896, was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical and classical subject matter...
, Hollyer began to photograph paintings and drawings in the 1870s. Artists whose work he published include
Edward Burne-JonesSir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
,
George Frederic WattsGeorge Frederic Watts, OM was a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life...
,
Simeon SolomonSimeon Solomon was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter-Biography:...
, and
Dante Gabriel RossettiDante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
. Of his work with the Pre-Raphaelites,
The TimesThe Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
noted that
Hollyer's photographs of drawings were particularly successful; printed on high-quality paper, they were often mistaken for originals. One of the most popular was a study of three heads by Burne-Jones for
The Masque of Cupid.
Hollyer also took studio portraits and specialized in interior and exterior photos of houses. For 30 years, he reserved Mondays for portrait photography in his Pembroke Square studio. His sitters included the artists
Walter CraneWalter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
,
William MorrisWilliam Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, G. F. Watts, and Burne-Jones; the writers John Ruskin,
H. G. WellsHerbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
, and
George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
; and the actresses
Mrs Patrick CampbellMrs Patrick Campbell was a British stage actress.-Early life and marriages:Campbell was born Beatrice Stella Tanner in Kensington, London, to John Tanner and Maria Luigia Giovanna, daughter of Count Angelo Romanini...
and
Ellen TerryDame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
. Hollyer eschewed the formal poses of most studio portraiture of his day; in an 1899 interview in
The Photogram he said
Hollyer did much to establish photography as a fine art. His work was widely acclaimed in his own day; in 1897, a critic in
The StudioThe Studio was the name of a small artists' loft commune formed in 1975 by four comic book artists/fine illustrator/painters in Manhattan's Chelsea district. These artists were Barry Windsor-Smith, Jeff Jones, Michael William Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson....
lamented:
Hollyer joined the
Royal Photographic SocietyThe Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...
1865 and became a Fellow in 1895, but was also involved in
The Linked RingThe Linked Ring was a photographic society created to propose and defend that photography was just as much an art as it was a science, motivated to propelling photography further into the fine art world...
, a society formed in to support
pictorialismPictorialism is the name given to a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism...
in opposition to the Photographic Society. He was a member of the Solar Club and became one of the Founder Members of the Professional Photographers' Association in 1901.
Later life
Frederick Hollyer married Mary Anne Armstrong (1838–1913). Their eldest son Frederick Thomas Hollyer (1870–1952) worked with his father and took over the studio when the elder Hollyer retired in 1913. Frederick Hollyer died 21 November 1933 at his eldest son's home in
BlewburyBlewbury is a village and civil parish at the foot of the Berkshire Downs about south of Didcot. It was part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes transferred it to Oxfordshire.-Prehistory:...
(then part of
BerkshireBerkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
), aged 95.
Today, Hollyer is remembered chiefly for his photographs of Burne-Jones, William Morris, and their circle. Under British copyright law, Hollyer's photographs are now
public domainWorks are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
as he died more than 70 years ago.
External links