Images from Scholars

Donations from scholars

There was another key route by which images were acquired for the Centre’s Photographic Archive: directly from scholars working in the field. Such collections were usually amassed as a result of extensive or lifelong research and therefore often comprised hundreds, sometimes thousands, of images related to a particular artist. They were acquired by donation or purchase. Over the course of the Photographic Archive’s history, eight separate groups of material were acquired in this fashion from scholars including Ellis Waterhouse, John Hayes, and David Solkin. Some were amalgamated directly into the main sequence of Photo Archive images (e.g. Dudley Snelgrove’s gift of 900 images of the L.G. Duke Collection). Others were retained separately in order to better reflect the academic work of the particular scholar (e.g. David Solkin’s collection of 200 images of works by Richard Wilson).

In 2011, following the appointment of the Centre’s first professional archivist, the collections that had been retained separately were reviewed as part of a wider survey of archival material at the Centre. Two collections—the Ellis Waterhouse and John Hayes Archives—were found to contain original material, such as correspondence and research notes. The images themselves were often heavily annotated. For this reason, the Waterhouse and Hayes collections were re-designated as “Collected Archive” material so that they could be better managed and preserved in accordance with the professional standards applicable to their unique status. They are now managed separately from the Centre’s Photographic Archive, and have been fully catalogued. Descriptions of their contents are available online.

Between 1970 and 1990 the Centre spent an average of £2,600 per annum purchasing prints from external sources. but by the 1990s the rate of growth of the Photographic Archive had slowed considerably. The three main sources of acquisition for images being added at this time were the CPS, auction houses, and through the Centre’s own publishing activities. After this date, the Centre employed photographers on a freelance basis to carry out the work. Images continued to be added to the Photographic Archive from these sources, but by 2010 this had slowed down to a rate of approximately 300 per year.¹ By this time, owing to the historic research interests and activities of the Centre, the core focus of the resource was the eighteenth century, with holdings on artists including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, Joseph Wright of Derby, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable being particularly strong. A legacy of the “grant-in-kind” activity, holdings on other more obscure artists were also noteworthy.

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Footnotes