William Lake Price

From Architectural Drawing and Watercolor to Constructed Photographs

Getty ULAN records that Price trained in the studio of the architect Augustus Charles Pugin as an architectural and topographical painter and exhibited forty-two works with the Old Watercolour Society between 1837 and 1852. Before taking up photography, he had already been trained to organize perspective, interior space, and historical style within a single image^*1. After moving into photography, he continued to use that compositional discipline in a medium whose images were made from actual bodies and objects.

Photography in the 1850s required long exposures, making it difficult to capture narrative scenes with several moving figures in a single natural moment. Price treated his models like actors, holding them still while he selected costume, furniture, weapons, books, and other objects in advance and designed the final image before the exposure. The Lake Price Album at the Harry Ransom Center contains works not only by Price but also by Rejlander, Fenton, Hill & Adamson, Robinson, and others, showing that in Britain around 1855–60 art photography, portraiture, landscape, and reproduction still circulated within a shared photographic culture^*2. When fictional characters were performed for the camera instead of painted, the costumes, bodies, and interiors retained the photographic force of having physically existed before the lens. The resulting images were planned like history paintings or literary illustrations yet could still be seen as traces of an event that had actually been staged.

Don Quixote in His Study and the Construction of Narrative in Photography

Don Quixote in His Study places a model in a chair surrounded by books, weapons, armor, and scrolls, building a fictional character out of concrete objects in an interior. The NGA records the work as photographed in 1855 and printed as a photogravure by the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Company in 1857^*4. The Getty impression of the same subject likewise confirms a production process in which photographing and printing were separate stages^*16. Here, photography’s physical specificity serves not the portrait of a real sitter but a reenactment of Cervantes’s fiction using actual bodies and things.

The composition of Don Quixote was made at two stages: the control of figures and props before exposure and the subsequent reproduction and circulation of the image through photomechanical printing. Its inclusion as a photomechanical print in the 1857 Photographic Art Treasures shows that a staged photograph could travel beyond a single exhibition object and reach a different audience through publication^*12. The surviving evidence supports understanding Price less through monumental multi-negative composites than through his treatment of staging before exposure and reproduction afterward as a continuous process of image construction.

Literature, Portraiture, Art Reproduction, and the City — Changing the Standard to Fit the Use

Price also made portraits of artists, including Royal Academicians. A portrait of the painter Augustus Leopold Egg recorded in the Getty Museum Journal bears the printed line “Photographed from Life by Lake Price,” making the fact that the sitter was the actual person—a reversal of the literary tableau—part of the photograph’s value as a commodity^*11. The NGA’s Horse-drawn Carriage and Female Rider likewise shows an outdoor scene of a real rider, horse, and carriage, confirming that Price’s photography was not confined to staged interiors^*5.

In 1859 he traveled to Rome to photograph paintings for Prince Albert’s Raphael collection project. The Royal Archives preserve a letter in which Price reports negotiations for permission to photograph works in private collections in Rome^*9. Another letter describes the conditions of access to the works and the practical progress of the photography on site^*10. Here, accurate reproduction—bringing back images of works located elsewhere for comparative study—took precedence over literary staging. The subject list shows a systematic plan to turn works associated with Raphael and architectural drawings into photographic study material^*15. The fact that the same photographer produced fictional tableaux and exacting art reproductions suggests that early photography is better understood as a medium whose standards of composition and precision changed with use than through a simple division between “art” and “record.”

Recent research on photographic reproduction at the Prado records that in November 1857 Price photographed twelve paintings by Velázquez at the Real Museo de Pinturas y Esculturas, now the Museo del Prado. The study shows that the museum was beginning to recognize photographic reproduction as a means of enabling study and dissemination abroad as well as creating internal records^*21. In this setting, the camera functioned as a vehicle of knowledge, carrying images of immovable paintings elsewhere, in a role very different from its use in constructing fictional tableaux.

Price himself did not treat art reproduction as a simple matter of the camera making an exact copy. Research on his 1868 A Manual of Photographic Manipulation notes his argument that good reproductions of oil paintings were especially difficult because color could translate into unexpected tonal values in monochrome, while impasto and surface reflections could appear with a strength unlike the original^*22. Whether constructing literary tableaux or translating paintings into photographs, he treated photography as a process that converted color, light, and material into a different tonal system, not as a transparent automatic copy.

Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill directs the eye down the street toward St Paul’s Cathedral, while carriages and pedestrians establish the depth of the roadway. The Royal Collection records Queen Victoria’s purchase of photographs from Price in 1858^*6. A Ramsgate photograph in the same collection shows that seaside urban views also formed part of his work^*7. An interior of Osborne House in the Royal Collection demonstrates yet another use, organizing furniture and architectural space for the camera^*17. Because he could shift between fully controlling props in literary tableaux and accepting the passing traffic of people and carriages in the city, his work cannot be reduced to a single “painterly style.”

“On Composition and Chiar-Oscuro” — Theorizing Photographic Composition

Price’s historical importance lies less in a title such as “the first art photographer” than in his effort to formulate photographic composition as something photographers could study and judge. His 1860 series in Photographic News, “On Composition and Chiar-Oscuro,” applied art theory, including Joshua Reynolds, to photography and discussed unity, light and shade, and the placement of figures and objects within the frame^*14. When Henry Peach Robinson began his 1868 series “Pictorial Effect in Photography,” the editors explicitly looked back to Price’s earlier essays and argued that the application of compositional principles to photography required further practical development^*14. The connection to a later photographer can therefore be documented as a theoretical reference in the photographic press, not merely as a similarity of style.

His photographs likewise treat photography as more than simply framing what was already there. Don Quixote in His Study brings the figure, chair, books, weapons, armor, and scrolls together as a single characterization^*4, while Robinson Crusoe reenacts Defoe’s story with a figure, cave, dog, bird, and sheep. The Princeton University Art Museum records the latter as a staged photograph shown at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857^*19. Because literary characters were repeatedly constructed through real models and objects, this was a sustained problem of photographic narrative, not an eccentric experiment confined to Don Quixote.

Treating Exposure, Printing, and Publication as One Production Process

Don Quixote was photographed in 1855 and printed by the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Company as a photo-galvanograph in 1857. The NGA credits both photographer and printing company, making clear that the image did not end in the camera but reached circulation through a printing process^*13. Its publication in Photographic Art Treasures likewise shows that a staged photograph could reach new viewers through reproducible print publication rather than remaining a singular exhibition object^*12. A Brace of Birds at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is also recorded as a photomechanical print from 1857, showing that the printing process was used for still life as well as literary tableaux^*20. In early photography, where sensitized materials, negatives, prints, retouching, and printing formed a continuum, the later binary that an altered image is somehow “not photography” is difficult to apply.

The National Gallery of Art’s artist record presents Price as a watercolorist who moved into photography and worked across portraiture, still life, and urban views^*3. In the Royal Archives records of the Raphael reproduction project, some owners hesitated to permit photography because earlier attempts had damaged works, linking photographic reproduction to questions of access and conservation^*8. For Price, photographic production therefore encompassed more than composition before exposure: access to the work, the negative, printing process, publication, and client were all part of the chain.

Later Reception Through Composition, Reproduction, and the Archive

Price is not remembered through one monumental image to the same degree as Rejlander, and his roles as painter, photographer, reproductive-image maker, and technical writer can appear dispersed. The album at the Harry Ransom Center makes that dispersion visible in a single object. His own photographs sit beside those of contemporaries, showing that he participated in photography not only as a maker but also as a collector and comparator of images^*2. Emily Talbot’s research positions Price’s writing on composition as an important precursor to the British discourse of art photography later developed by Robinson^*14.

The photography historian Steve Edwards analyzes Price’s 1868 manual as an example of a 1860s British discourse in which the uses of photography appeared capable of almost unlimited expansion^*23. The manual addresses portraiture and art reproduction while also imagining photography as a record capable of carrying contemporary people, events, and monuments into the future; archival scholarship has likewise discussed this historical consciousness^*24. For Price, “composition” was therefore not confined to art photography. It concerned the broader design of what information photography should preserve, how it should be reproduced, and how it would reach later viewers.

Later in the nineteenth century, Peter Henry Emerson treated the staged High Art photography of Price, Rejlander, Robinson, and others as an artificial method against which naturalistic photography should define itself. The Met explicitly describes this opposition^*18. Price’s approach was therefore not simply inherited intact. It became a reference point in the continuing dispute over how far photography should be composed and staged. When his fictional tableaux, portraits, urban views, and exacting art reproductions are considered together, his importance exceeds the claim that he made photography more like painting. Through both images and theory, he showed how an automatic recording process could change meaning through performance before exposure, pictorial organization, reproduction, and use.