By Famous Photographer Henry Peach Robinson

THIS IS MY GRANDMOTHER'S MOTHER ANGELINE (1857-1904) who married William Pawley in 1873. Her parents were Henry K. Howard, a master brewer born in England in 1821, and his wife Jane, born in Ireland in 1827. After emigrating to America about 1846 they had three daughters, of whom Angeline was the youngest, born in Cornwall, Orange County, New York, in 1857. She had one brother, two years her junior. According to my mother, Angeline lived up to her name, sweet as an angel.

	Photo Chris Parker/TWBC   Click to visit Royal Tunbridge Wells

The back of Angeline's portrait is inscribed "Photographed from Nature by H. P. Robinson at the Great Hall Studio, Tunbridge Wells." As the most prominent exponent of High Art photography, Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) gave a picturesque rendering even to a simple portrait such as this.

Like many early photographers, he had to give up darkroom work at the age of 34 because of nerve disease caused by toxic photographic chemicals, and he eventually died of their effects.

But in 1871 Robinson had recovered sufficiently to move south to Tunbridge Wells. He set up his studio in the newly built Great Hall ─ now a Shopping Arcade ─ where he had leased the entire west wing. Its entrance door was wide enough to admit invalids in their Bath chairs coming from the Tunbridge Wells railway station opposite. In those days the couple peering in at the big window would have seen frames containing nearly 50 medals from exhibitions in Europe, America and India, together with large portrait photographs and perfect photographic miniatures coloured by hand, such as you see below.

The Great Hall was at that time in the grounds of the Calverley Hotel, which was owned by Angeline's husband, William Pawley. Such was the Victorian penchant for diminutives that Angeline's beautiful name was usually contracted to Annie.

A velvet and silk lined leather case holds this pair of portrait miniatures, done about 1880. The girl on the left is my grandmother Ethel: the lady on the right is probably Charlotte Pawley Ethel's paternal grandmother (the sitter is less likely to have been her maternal grandmother, the American Jane Howard).

The miniatures are on a base of either white glass or porcelain. A method of fixing and coloring photographic images taken by the collodion process upon glass, enamel, etc. was patented in England in 1854.  For a history of such techniques and a do-it-yourself guide click here.

The teenager portrayed on the right by Minor and Guiwits, Photographers of Richfield Springs and Waterville, New York, is probably Angeline, whose 1886 portrait in oils (left) was painted by Georgina Koberwein Terrell (fl.1876-1903).  She was a New Yorker whose usual subjects were boats.  The shades of brown fashionable in that era are applied with short and slightly contrasting brush strokes - one can easily imagine a view of the Hudson River rendered in the same technique.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
Reproduction or transmission, in whole or in part, for other than personal use is prohibited without advance permission from Dr. G. H. McLaughlin.