John Jabez Edwin Mayall

From Philadelphia to London

Mayall was born in Britain and ran a daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia in the early 1840s, while also lecturing on chemistry. After moving to London in 1846, he obtained a license from Richard Beard, who held the British daguerreotype patent, and opened the American Daguerreotype Institution the following year.^*1 The Science Museum Group Journal traces his commercial daguerreotype work in Philadelphia, where British patent restrictions did not apply, and his return to Britain in 1846, when he first worked with Antoine Claudet.^*2 As the National Portrait Gallery records, he went on to make portraits on a large scale, from members of the royal family to figures in cultural life, building one of Britain’s leading portrait studios.^*3

Daguerreotypes at the 1851 Great Exhibition and London’s Portrait Trade

For Mayall, photography was more than a substitute for painted portraiture. The daguerreotype recorded skin, hair, clothing, and jewelry in minute detail and fixed the face of a well-known figure such as the scientist John Herschel on a unique metal plate. The surviving portrait of Herschel brings together the object-like singularity of the daguerreotype and the desire to preserve a celebrated person through a direct likeness.^*18 At the Great Exhibition of 1851, Mayall also showed vignetted portraits in which the head remains sharp while the surrounding image gradually falls out of focus, using lighting and background treatment to draw attention to the face.^*1 His early and mid-career portraits therefore joined technical competition over photographic precision with a commercial need to preserve the sitter’s dignity and produce an image that customers could easily read.^*10

Mayall had already competed for technical distinction in portrait photography before he turned to the carte-de-visite. A Getty study of the daguerreotype records that he exhibited seventy-two daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and received an Honorable Mention.^*26 His career thus moved from technical recognition for unique silver-plate portraits to the market for reproducible, comparatively inexpensive cartes-de-visite by 1860.

Photographing Queen Victoria’s Family in Domestic Poses

In 1860, Mayall photographed Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their children at Buckingham Palace and other royal residences, then sold a selection as the Royal Album. The Royal Collection records one image of the Queen looking at a book resting on Prince Albert’s lap as part of the set released for public sale.^*4 A carte-de-visite portrait of Prince Albert from the same period compresses a full-length court portrait into a small card while retaining the decorum expected of royal imagery.^*5 The National Portrait Gallery of Australia notes that the Queen’s acceptance of this small, relatively “democratic” format, and her permission for mass printing, marked a significant shift in the circulation of royal portraiture.^*6

Why the Carte-de-Visite?

The carte-de-visite suited Mayall’s royal portraits because many paper prints could be made from a single negative, then sold, mailed, or exchanged one by one. The small prints could be repeated from the same negative, slipped into envelopes, and inserted into albums. An album of forty-seven royal cartes-de-visite in the National Galleries of Scotland shows exactly how purchased royal photographs could be arranged by sitter, compared, and preserved as a collection.^*7 The London Museum’s portrait of Bulwer-Lytton shows that Mayall’s Regent Street studio was placing prominent politicians and writers on the same standardized cards by 1862.^*15 As Historic Royal Palaces observes, the royal family also used photography to cultivate an approachable image of domestic life, while Mayall’s sales network carried that image to a broad public.^*16

Studio Staging and the Image of Celebrity

Mayall’s portraits were carefully staged rather than spontaneous snapshots in the later sense. Chairs, books, hats, curtains, and standing poses were arranged deliberately. In a daguerreotype of a man pointing to an open book, the act of reading functions as a prop for profession, education, and character, and the plate was further enhanced with hand coloring.^*10 A portrait of Daguerre survives as an albumen print from a glass negative, showing how the image of the same kind of prominent sitter had entered a reproducible photographic system.^*11 Wood engravings made from Mayall’s photographs of the royal family also appeared in magazines, carrying his images beyond the photographic card into print media.^*13

The Royal Album, 1860

The most consequential change in the Royal Album concerned distribution as much as pose. The small albumen print The Queen and Prince Consort contains the two figures within the format of the card without relying on an expansive setting to proclaim courtly authority.^*12 A royal image could therefore sit in a domestic album beside photographs of actors, politicians, explorers, and acquaintances. Surviving British and European albums from the 1860s and 1870s likewise preserve cards by different photographers, including Mayall, within the same collecting system.^*20

From Daguerreotypes to Paper Prints

Mayall’s career makes it possible to follow, within a single studio, the shift from unique daguerreotypes to reproducible paper photographs. Copy of the Rosetta Stone, made around the late 1840s and early 1850s, shows that the daguerreotype’s one-off metal plate was used to reproduce cultural artifacts as well as people.^*8 His daguerreotype copy of a painting by Domenichino is another instance in which a painting was rephotographed so that an image of the original could be seen elsewhere.^*9 By the later 1850s, Mayall was also contributing paper prints to collective publications such as photographic-club albums, bringing studio portraiture and exchange among photographers into the same paper medium.^*22

The Album Culture of Collecting Cartes-de-Visite

The Harry Ransom Center preserves daguerreotypes, numerous prints, and royal cards by Mayall, showing how his output existed in quantity as cards, albums, and studio products rather than only as isolated masterpieces.^*17 Getty’s portrait of an unidentified couple from about 1861 confirms that customers outside the royal family also commissioned portraits in the same carte-de-visite format.^*19 Because photographs of royals and private clients were made at roughly the same card size, album owners could preserve portraits of people from very different social ranks within a single volume.

Technical Prestige and the Commercial Studio

Describing Mayall simply as a “royal photographer” separates his technical experiments from the commercial studio that followed. Evidence places him with Claudet as an assistant in 1846, while a daguerreotype case containing multiple exposures of the moon bears Mayall’s studio address.^*14 He emerged from an environment close to scientific and optical experimentation and applied that precision to a popular portrait market. The National Portrait Gallery’s record of his connection to 510 portraits gives a sense of the scale at which individual authorship and studio production operated together.^*3

Royal Media and Celebrity Culture

The mass sale of royal photographs was not Mayall’s invention alone. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were themselves enthusiastic collectors of photography and made decisions about what could be released publicly.^*16 Within that system, Mayall arranged bodies, clothing, and furniture clearly inside the small card, producing concise portraits that could be sold in large numbers. A portfolio compiled by Queen Victoria and discussed by the National Portrait Gallery of Australia contains cards by several photographers, including Mayall, in the same volume.^*21 Viewers who had no access to court could purchase standardized royal portraits and place them beside family photographs or images of other public figures. Differences of rank remained attached to the sitters, while the physical format and method of storage became shared.

Royal Portraiture, the Carte-de-Visite, and Mayall’s Place in Photographic History

Mayall’s place in photographic history cannot be explained by a technical move from daguerreotype to paper photography alone. In his studio, the unique silver-plate portrait, carefully staged sittings, reproduction from negatives, carte-de-visite sales, domestic album collecting, and republication in print media formed a continuous commercial system. Comparing a one-of-a-kind portrait such as Herschel’s with the mass circulation of the Royal Album shows, within one career, how mid-nineteenth-century portrait photography expanded from a keepsake shared by sitter and photographer into a reproducible commodity moving through the marketplace.^*18

How Album Owners Arranged Royal Portraits

The Royal Album continued to be used after the photographs were sold, inside albums assembled by their owners. The National Portrait Gallery explains that the 1860 Royal Album made photographs of Queen Victoria publicly purchasable for the first time.^*23 The Royal Collection preserves a folding portfolio in which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert assembled fifty-four cartes-de-visite by Mayall, Camille Silvy, and other photographers, showing that the royal family itself exchanged, collected, and arranged the cards.^*24 The V&A situates the carte-de-visite as an inexpensive, reproducible medium widely used in album making and collage during the 1860s.^*25 Because the cards shared a standard format, owners could reorder portraits of royalty, celebrities, and relatives within a single volume. The mass sale of royal portraiture thus coincided with a wider culture in which owners collected, compared, and rearranged photographic portraits.