1353
tographic laboratory in the museum basement, but fi re
regulations prevented its use. His career as Keeper of
Minerals was successful and lasted for twenty years,
during which time he retained his professorship at Ox-
ford, but his photographic contribution was fi nished now
that chemical experiments were impossible. In the Brit-
ish Museum years, Maskelyne wrote numerous scientifi c
papers and counted great numbers of contemporary
scientists among his friends. When at last it was time
for him to leave the museum in 1879, the year his father
died, he returned to Wiltshire to manage the family es-
tate. He became Member of Parliament for Cricklade in
Gladstone’s Liberal government, and helped to prepare
bills on technological matters like electric lighting or
the ventilation of London’s underground railways. Even
though Nevil Story Maskelyne was not among the great
artistic photographers of the nineteenth century, he
created some interesting and sometimes lively images.
His enthusiasm and scientifi c ability are the attributes
which earn him his place in the history of the earliest
era of photography.
Vanda Morton
Biography
Nevil Story Maskelyne was born on 3 September,
1823, at Basset Down in the parish of Lydiard Tregoz,
North Wiltshire. An enthusiast for photography and
chemistry from his teenage years, he experimented fi rst
with photograms and then with calotype negatives and
prints. While a student at Worcester College, Oxford,
he exploited chemical elements to produce sharper
images and to record the growing foliage of trees in
sunlight. He experimented with mica as a stable base
for negatives, and was an early user of the albumen and
collodion processes on glass. He was deeply interested
in the properties of light and chemicals, and published
numerous scientifi c papers. Maskelyne later became
Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford, Keeper of Minerals
at the British Museum and Member of Parliament in
Gladstone’s government.
See also: Faraday, Michael; Talbot, William Henry
Fox; and Wheatstone, Charles.
Further Reading
Allison, D. 1981, Nevil Story-Maskelyne: Photographer. The
Photographic Collector 2, 2. 16–36.
Kraus, H.P., and Schaaf, L.J., undated. Sun Pictures, 1 and 2
(dealer’s catalogues).
Lassam, R.E., 1980. Nevil Story Maskelyne 1823–1911, History
of Photography 4, 2. 85–93.
——, 1981. Britain loses a family connection. British Journal of
Photography, 17 July 1981, 720–721.
Morton, V., 1987, Oxford Rebels: the life and friends of Nevil
Story Maskelyne 1823–1911. Alan Sutton, Gloucester.
STUART-WORTLEY, COLONEL HENRY
(1832–1890)
Archibald Henry Plantagenent Stuart-Wortley was born
26 July 1832 at Wortley, Yorkshire. His father Charles
James Stuart-Wortley died in 1844. His mother Lady
Emmeline née Manners, was a poet and travel writer and
his sister Victoria, as Lady Welby, became a pioneer in
the fi eld of semantics. Henry joined the army in 1848
as a lieutenant and served as a Captain during the Kaffi r
Wars 1850–53 in Africa and in the Crimea in1854–55
Deputy-Assistant Quarter Master as a Brevet-Major. It
was while in Africa in1853 that Stuart-Wortley took up
photography and later observed Roger Fenton in ac-
tion in the Crimea in 1855. After his mother died while
travelling to Beirut in October 1855 Stuart-Wortley
escorted his sister back to England where he remained
on half-pay during 1856, briefl y pursued a career in
politics in 1858–59 and retired by sale of his commis-
sion in February1862 being granted the honorary rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel.
Photography became a vocation for Stuart-Wortley
by 1860 and he sought advice from photographic inno-
vators, particularly in the new ‘dry ‘collodion processes,
including Thomas Sutton and George Wharton Simpson,
respectively editors of Photographic Notes and Photo-
graphic News who looked to the leisured amateurs to
advance photography. Of particular interest in these
years was the search for a means to capture motion in
photographs, i.e. with exposures under about a second
and the development of various “dry” processes to
preserve the sensitivity of wet-plates for use outdoors
and over the decade the development of dry- collodion
plates and developers.
Stuart-Wortley took a trip to India in 1860 where he
practiced his craft but it was on his Mediterranean travels
in 1861 that he began to apply methods of his own for
securing the desired “instantaneous” photography. He
must have been familiar with the work of pioneer marine
photographer of the 1850s John Dillwyn Lewellyn and
the secret of Gustave Le Gray’s dramatic “moonlit”
effects achieved by photographing directly into a cloud-
covered sun at mid-afternoon. Stuart-Wortley however,
used a fast wide aperture and learned to whip his cap
over his Dallmeyer triplet achromatic lens in under a
second. He used a version of a dry collodion process
in the fi eld, a light-tight carrying box of his own de-
sign, fi xed the negatives at night and then intensifi ed
the thin plates on his return. On his return to England
his atmospheric Italian pictures showing the belching
Mt Vesuvius, waves and rich cloud effects gained him
membership in 1862 of the Photographic Society of
London and an honourable mention as at the Society’s
International Salon. As referenced from “9th Annual
Exhibition of the Photographic Society London,” Brit-
ish Journal of Photography, January 15 1863 p.31, his