1213
Titterington, Chris, Photographs by Horatio Ross, 1801–1886.
New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1993.
ROSSE, LADY (1813–1885)
English photographer
Lady Rosse was born Mary Field in Yorkshire in 1813 to
Anne Field and John Wilmer, a wealthy landowner. Her
mother died shortly after her birth and she was raised
by a governess. In 1836, she married William Parsons,
Lord Oxmantown, and they took up residence at his
family’s seat at Birr Castle in Ireland. He became the
3 rd Earl of Rosse after the death of his father in 1841.
Lady Rosse took up photography in 1854 following the
lead of her husband, who began experimenting with
the daguerreotype process in 1842. Among her photo-
graphs that survive are group portraits, single portraits
and landscapes, as well as many pictures of telescopes
built by her husband. Lady Rosse was closely involved
in the Earl’s construction projects, and some of her fi rst
photographs portray his telescopes. The Photographic
Society of Ireland awarded Lady Rosse their fi rst Silver
Medal in 1859. She was an elected member of the Dublin
Photographic Society and the Amateur Photographic
Association. Lady Rosse moved to London in 1870
following the death of her husband in 1867. She died
in London in 1885 and was buried in the family vault
at Birr Castle in Ireland.
Andrea Korda
Further Reading
Davison, David H., Impressions of an Irish Countess: The Photog-
raphy of Mary Countess of Rosse. Dublin: The Birr Scientifi c
Heritage Foundation, 1989.
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL
(1828–1882)
English painter and photographer
Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti
was born in 1828 in London. Son of an Italian intellec-
tual, Rossetti was the second of four children, including
the art critic William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919)
and poet Christina Rossetti (1830–94). Rossetti briefl y
trained as a painter at the Royal Academy schools and
with Ford Madox Brown. He formed the Pre- Raphaelite
Brotherhood in 1848 with other key members John
Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. Rossetti’s
relationship to photography was limited. He loosely
used a group of photographs as the basis for many of
his later portraits and studies of Jane Morris, the wife
of designer, poet, and socialist William Morris. These
albumen prints were taken in 1865 in the garden of
Rossetti’s home in Chelsea, London, by the photogra-
pher John Robert Parsons, but it is assumed that Rossetti
posed Jane Morris himself. In the series of portraits, Jane
Morris is posed against a cloth tent or a fabric-covered,
patterned screen, wearing the loose-fi tting clothes she
adopted. She appears in several of the languid and
fl owing poses that Rossetti would make characteristic
of her in his paintings. These photographs are housed
in an album now in the collection of the Victoria &
Albert Museum. Rossetti also posed with his siblings
for a notable group of photographs taken in 1863 by
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Rossetti
died in 1882 in Birchington-on-Sea after several years
of illness.
Diane WaggonerROSSIER, PIERRE (1829–c. 1898)
Swiss photographer
Pierre Joseph Rossier was born on July 16, 1829, into a
farming family in Grandsivaz, Switzerland. A passport
issued to Rossier in October, 1855 listed his profession
as photographer and indicated that he was to travel
to France and England in order to practice his trade.
Sometime between 1855 and 1858, Rossier was hired
by the London photographic fi rm Negretti and Zambra.
They sent him to Asia from 1859 to 1861, where he
was among some of the fi rst to produce commercial
photographs (primarily stereographic views) of Japan
and China. While in Japan, he trained Ueno Hikoma
and other fi rst-generation Japanese photographs in the
collodion wet-plate procedure. His employment with
Negretti and Zambra seems to have ended sometime
in 1861. Rossier then traveled to Thailand, where he
assisted the French zoologist Firmin Bocourt by taking
ethnographic portraits of local people. He returned to
Switzerland in 1864, operating a photography studio in
Freiburg until at least 1876 that produced stereograph
and cartes-de-visite views of local scenes as well as por-
traits. Captions on the mounts indicate that Rossier also
had a studio in the Swiss city of Einsiedeln, although no
dates of operation are known. He died in Paris sometime
before 1898.
Karen FraserROUCH, WILLIAM WHITE (1833–1871)
The business of William White Rouch & Co began in
1854 as a partnership trading under the name of Burf-
ield & Rouch as operative chemists, philosophical and
photographic instrument makers, at 180 Strand, London.
By 1864 it was trading as W. W. Rouch & Co under
which name it remained until it ceased actively trading
in photographic equipment around 1914.