1243
patents (1858 No. 725, and 1858 No. 1501) covering
aspects of studio practice and the coloring of prints, and
another in 1862 for an improved combined posing chair
and head restraint.
He employed painters and colourists to produce large
portraits from his photographs, and opened and devel-
oped an art gallery selling paintings, lithographs, and
his own photographs of royalty and celebrities. His fame
drew a visit by the Prince of Wales in 1869, resulting in
a sitting which further extended Sarony’s.
In his obituary (Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin,
September 1879, 287) his Scarborough operation was
described, at its height, as having 98 rooms and employ-
ing 110 staff.
By the late 1860s, Sarony & Co. was offering for
sale a range of studio backdrops—reportedly painted
by his brother Napoleon who had, by that time, opened
a photographic studio in New York.
By 1864 he had been joined in England by Napoleon,
whose Birmingham studio, Sarony & Co., operated from
premises in New Street from 1864 until after 1880. The
British Journal of Photography in its issue of April 28
1865, 222, reported Napoleon’s patent ‘Improvements
in the Production and Treatment of Photographs.’ A few
weeks earlier, the American Journal of Photography
and the Allied Arts & Sciences, Feb. 1 1865, 351–352,
had commented on Napoleon’s new techniques for
vignetting being used in the Birmingham Studio, and
in May 1866, The Art Journal reported that he “is one
of the best photographers [working] in Birmingham”
and that he “uses the ‘rest’ invented by his brother, of
Scarborough.”
But the Birmingham venture was not his fi rst. Napo-
leon Sarony’s fi rst studio is believed to have opened in
Yonkers in 1857, where he was listed as a daguerreo-
typist, at which time he was still involved with the
lithographic business of Sarony Major & Knapp. The
fact that Knapp joined the partnership at that time may
have been as a result of Napoleon’s decision to change
professions. The studio is not listed after 1858, and he is
believed to have left for a tour of European lithographic
companies some time before 1860, arriving in England
in 1863. With the Birmingham studio established,
however, he returned to America, and his New York in
Union Square studio opened in 1866 or 1867. Over the
following thirty years he is reputed to have photographed
every major star on the New York stage.
Napoleon was a major infl uence in the emerging
use of publicity photographs in the theatre. In addition
he photographed many writers and celebrities. By the
time of his death in 1896, the studio is believed to have
amassed an archive of over forty thousand negatives.
Napoleon was at the centre of a celebrated court case in
1883, over the unauthorized duplication and publication
of one of his portraits of Oscar Wilde. The case of The
Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company against Napoleon
Sarony was heard fi rst in a District Court, and subse-
quently argued in the US Supreme Court in December- It centered on whether or not the copyright protec-
tion granted to photographers under the US Copyright Act
of July 1870 was constitutional. The question related to
whether or not the photograph existed separately from the
person it portrayed—and as Oscar Wilde’s physical ap-
pearance was not copyright, nor could be a photograph of
him. In 1884 the Supreme Court found in favor of Sarony,
but conceded that all photographs might not necessarily
be thus protected. Central to this defi nition of copyright
was the ideal that the photograph should be “entirely from
his own mental conception” and that the photographer
must be responsible for “arranging the subject so as to
present graceful outlines, arranging and disposing the
light and shade, [and] suggesting and evoking the desired
expression.” Thus, this ruling constitutionally defi ned a
Sarony, Napoleon. Oscar Wilde.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection,
Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
(2005.100.120) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.