Robert Howlett

The Photographic Institution and Howlett as a Professional Photographer

Howlett began photographing around 1852 and worked at the Photographic Institution on New Bond Street in London. Founded by Joseph Cundall and others, the Photographic Institution was a commercial center for portraiture, reproductions of works of art, publishing, and commissioned photography. The National Portrait Gallery records that Howlett received royal commissions there to reproduce works by Raphael and to photograph soldiers returning from the Crimean War, showing that he was already a professional photographer serving several kinds of commission before the Great Eastern project^*8. National Galleries of Scotland material on Cundall likewise presents the institution as a place where photography and publishing met and notes Howlett’s involvement in its work by the mid-1850s^*22.

In the Valley of the Mole shows that Howlett also made landscape photographs independently before the Great Eastern commission^*7. His surviving work includes landscape, portraits of royal and cultural figures, Crimean veterans, and industrial sites, crossing several genres demanded by the commercial photographic profession during his brief career. The Great Eastern photographs emerged from this broader professional practice.

Howlett was elected to the Photographic Society of London in December 1855, and the membership record gives the Photographic Institution on New Bond Street as his address^*23. The following year he published On the Various Methods of Printing Photographic Pictures upon Paper, which discussed albumen paper, plain paper, the ammonio-nitrate process, fading, and the preservation of prints^*24. His technical work spanned large wet plates in the camera and the systematic study of printing and permanence in writing.

Howlett met the photographic chemist Thomas Frederick Hardwich through the Photographic Society in 1855, and the two conducted experiments in optics and chemistry. Hardwich assisted with Howlett’s 1856 manual on printing, and Howlett thanked him for his advice in the preface^*27. The chemical knowledge behind exposure and printing was being developed through photographic societies and collaborative experimentation among specialists.

The Scale of the Great Eastern

The Great Eastern measured about 210 meters in length and greatly exceeded the scale of earlier ships; its construction and launch were themselves public news about British engineering. In The Met’s The Bow of the Great Eastern, the bow rises like a cliff through scaffolding and timber, while the ground and small human figures provide a means of reading its size^*3. The V&A likewise explains that the inclusion of people and small boats made the immense hull measurable by comparison^*1. Precise detail in iron plates and chains, set against the human body, translated an industrial scale outside ordinary experience into a visual comparison.

The large camera and wet-plate collodion process used for the series could record iron plates, rivets, chains, and timber in considerable detail, but they also required equipment for sensitizing, exposing, and developing the plates quickly on site. The V&A describes Howlett’s use of a large sliding-box camera and a darkroom tent^*1. The Met’s view of the stern records the structure while it was still surrounded by scaffolding and construction activity, showing how industrial photography could preserve both a finished object and the stages of its making^*4.

The Great Eastern series photographs enormous equipment and the people working beside it as different scales within the same enterprise. In Men at Work Beside the Launching Chains, several workers stand in front of chains and drums, allowing the machinery to be understood in relation to the body^*5. The portrait centered on Brunel and the site photographs containing workers divide the same shipbuilding project into the roles of designer, labor, and equipment.

The Brunel Portrait

In the 1857 portrait of Brunel, the engineer stands before the enormous drum of the chains used to launch the Great Eastern; the industrial setting takes the place of a neutral studio backdrop. The Met explains that the portrait grew out of the commission to document the ship and brought together an engineer associated with Britain’s Industrial Revolution and a vast industrial project within one frame^*2. The NPG reads Brunel’s hands-in-pockets stance, hat, and cigar as producing an air of someone at ease with the work around him^*9. By keeping the machinery in view, the portrait joins Brunel’s face, profession, the scale of the project, and the industrial setting.

From Photograph to Newspaper Engraving

The Great Eastern photographs reached a public far beyond buyers of photographic prints. The Met records that the January 16, 1858 issue of the Illustrated Times published nine wood engravings based on Howlett’s photographs^*3. The V&A describes this kind of newspaper commission as relatively unusual at a time when photographic reporting was still taking shape^*1. Because photographs could not yet be printed directly in a mass newspaper, engravers translated Howlett’s compositions into wood blocks, allowing the hull, the construction site, and Brunel to circulate as visual news on a national scale. The sequence from on-site photography to reproduction and distribution records an early production structure for press images.

Stereoscopy and Collaborative Production

Howlett also produced stereoscopic photographs related to the Great Eastern with George Downes. An NPG stereoscopic portrait turns Brunel and the enormous chains into a paired image that reconstructs depth when viewed through a stereoscope^*10. The Met’s photograph of hydraulic rams is jointly credited to Robert Howlett and George Downes and belongs to a group made for the London Stereoscopic Company^*6. The visual identity of the Great Eastern therefore branched into Howlett’s individual prints, collaborative production, stereoscopic publishing, and newspaper engraving, circulating the same industrial project through different authorial credits and viewing devices.

Crimean Heroes

The year before the Great Eastern commission, Howlett worked with Cundall to photograph soldiers returning from the Crimean War. The National Army Museum recounts that Queen Victoria requested photographs after reviewing returning veterans, leading to portraits such as Sergeant Glasgow^*12. Colour-Sergeant Macgregor is another example from the Aldershot sittings^*13. National Galleries of Scotland notes that Cundall produced orderly studio portraits of celebrated veterans while Howlett also photographed badly wounded men in hospitals and naval facilities, indicating different modes of representation within the same collaborative project^*11.

The NGA’s Crimean Braves is an example in which photographs by Howlett and Joseph Cundall entered a reproductive process handled by the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Company^*15. The NGA also credits the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Company as an independent maker, preserving the roles of photographer, collaborator, and reproduction firm in the production of a single image^*17. Portraits such as John Dryden also survive, and Howlett’s short career can therefore be understood as professional photography that crossed industry, the military, and cultural portraiture^*16.

Industrial Heroes and the Worksite

The Great Eastern embodied technological ambition but was also marked by difficulties in launching and by commercial failure. The Brunel Museum’s hull print and related collection preserve both the ship’s later symbolic status and different stages of construction and launch^*18. Its Great Eastern holdings bring together Brunel’s portrait, the immense hull, launching machinery, and labor as records of one project^*19. Photography could promote the achievement, yet the presence of scaffolding, hydraulic machinery, and workers also preserves the industrial project as an organization of people and material.

The Great Eastern also belonged to a Victorian visual culture in which engineering itself became a public spectacle. Recent art-historical research describes the giant ship as a spectacle where science, capital, and showmanship converged and notes that the small workers and managers in Howlett’s photographs communicate the extraordinary scale of the hull to viewers^*25. The series therefore records shipbuilding technology while also functioning as a medium through which the scale of industrialization could be seen.

The NGA artist page makes available surviving works by Howlett beyond Brunel, including portraits and photographs of veterans of the Crimean War^*14. The Getty also holds works from his brief period of activity^*21. Across commissions at the Photographic Institution, royal reproductions, veterans, large wet-plate photographs of the Great Eastern, stereographs, and newspaper engravings, the camera negative passed through engravers, printing firms, publishers, and the stereoscopic market before becoming a public image. For media history, Howlett’s work preserves a concrete structure in which specialized labor connected field photography to reproductive media before industrial and press photography became directly tied to mass printing. The means of bringing a photograph into public circulation helped shape the work’s meaning and reception.

The portrait of Brunel with the launching chains is now held by MoMA and has appeared repeatedly in exhibitions^*20. A commissioned photograph of nineteenth-century engineering thus survives in the museum as a work through which portraiture, industrial photography, and the composition of early photography can be considered together. Howlett’s short career has consequently been reassessed as an example of photography participating in the public image of industrial society.

The December 1858 Liverpool and Manchester Photographic Journal reported Howlett’s death and noted both that his photographs were more widely known than the man himself and that the photographic community regarded him as an accomplished technician^*26. His death at twenty-seven prevented any later theoretical development, but contemporaries recognized him as a specialist knowledgeable in printing processes and in the varied demands of commissioned photography.