Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

Colin Murray
Reversing station on the
S.I.P. at Khandalla on the
Bhue Ghats albumen silver
photograph 18.8 x 30.4 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
Charles T Scowen
Sinhalese girl 1870s
albumen silver photograph
28.0 x 22.0 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
50 national gallery of australia
Large-scale albumen prints are the exemplary
achievements of the nineteenth century; costly and
technically demanding, only the best resourced
photographers could undertake such mammoth prints.
Those who did included military officers who had learned
photography in India and came to be assigned on official
monuments surveys or took on projects out of personal
interest and ambition. In the Ricketts collection this type
of survey work is represented by eleven large prints from
1855 to 1857 by Captain Thomas Biggs (1822–1905) of
the Bombay Artillery and Dr William Pigou (1818–1858)
of the Bombay Medical Service, which come from
Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore, a three-volume
photographically illustrated book by Anglo-Indian scholar
Colonel Meadows Taylor published in London in 1866.
Working from 1855 to 1857 Biggs and Pigou were the first
designated ‘architectural photographers’ of sites in western
India. Dr John Murray (1809–1898) of the Bengal Medical
Establishment specialised in Mughal architecture of Agra,
Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi and mastered the difficult process
of mammoth plate paper negatives. The Gallery holds two
of his dense but mezzotint-like prints, including one from
his 1858 portfolio Agra and its vicinity.
Bombay photographers William Johnson and William
Henderson were among the earliest to make ethnographic
studies in India in 1857. Johnson’s The oriental races and
tribes, residents and visitors of Bombay (issued in two
volumes in London from 1863 to 1866) was the first
photographically illustrated ethnographical publication
on India.
Consumption of photography was by no means
limited to foreigners’ interests; royalty and upper echelon
administrators in India and elsewhere in Asia were keen
to present images of themselves as presents in exchange
for the many photographs sent to them by the crowned
heads and statesmen of Europe. A small group of portraits
of maharajas by unknown photographers in the Ricketts
collection reveal the splendour of the royal courts.
The largest individual holding and aesthetically the
‘jewel in the crown’ of the Ricketts collection is the group