1404
daguerreotypes remain untraced, as does one photograph
of a waterfall by an un-named photographer which is
listed as being framed and hung among the paintings.
Of the holdings of Townshend’s photographs still
extant in the Victoria and Albert Museum the greatest
group are twenty by Le Gray, comprising mainly his
Fontainebleau forest pictures and celebrated seascapes,
considered today to be among the fi nest selections of his
surviving prints in the world. Among the other important
photographs are a number by Camille Silvy, including
his masterpiece River Scene, France, (1858), André Gir-
oux’s landscape The Ponds at Obtevoz (Rhône) (c.1855)
and architectural studies by Édouard Baldus and the
Bisson Frères. Among Townshend’s photographically
illustrated books is The Sunbeam, (1859)—edited by
Philip H. Delamotte, including photographs by him and
others such as Joseph Cundall, Francis Bedford, George
Washington Wilson and John Dillwyn Llewelyn—Wil-
liam and Mary Howitt’s Ruined Abbeys and Castles of
Great Britain (1862) and photographic reproductions
of J.M.W. Turner’s compilation of drawings, the Liber
Studiorum, photographed by Cundall, Downes & Co.
(1862). Like many of his Victorian contemporaries,
Townshend was also fascinated by popular and eccentric
fi gures. The collection contains portraits of such people
Mr. Rarey the famous American horse trainer with the
stallion “Cruiser” by Caldesi and Montecchi (1858) and
the champion boxers, John C. Heenan, “The Benicia
Boy,” and Tom Sayers, by George Newbold (1860).
Townshend’s interest also extended to pictures of topical
interest at the time shown in Roger Fenton’s Crimean
war images and some remarkable scenes of ruined
houses in the aftermath of the “Clerkenwell Explosion”
taken by Henry Hering. On December 13th, 1867, a hole
was blown in the prison wall at Clerkenwell House by
Fenians attempting to release one of their group. The
photographs record the extent of the resulting damage to
buildings. These were some of the last objects collected
by Townshend before his death.
Martin Barnes
See also: Expositions Universelle, Paris 1854,
1855, 1867, etc.; Le Gray, Gustave; Giroux, André;
Victoria, Queen and Albert, Prince Consort; Silvy,
Camille; Baldus, Édouard; Bisson, Louis-Auguste
and Auguste-Rosalie; Delamotte, Philip Henry;
Cundall, Joseph; Lemere, Bedford; Wilson, George
Washington; and Llewelyn, John Dillwyn.
Further Reading
A Diversity of Gifts: Four Benefactors of the National Art Library,
National Art Library booklet, 1995.
Chauncy Hare Townshend 1798–1868, Wisbech and Fenland
Museum Library exhibition leafl et 1998.
Haworth-Booth, Mark, “The Dawning of an Age, Chauncy Hare
Townshend: Eyewitness,” in The Golden Age of British Pho-
tography, 1839–1900, Victoria and Albert Museum/Aperture,
NY, 1984.
Haworth-Booth, Mark, “A Connoisseur of the Art of Photography
in the 1850s: The Rev. C.H. Townshend.” In Perspectives
on Photography: Essays in Honour of Beaumont Newhall,
edited by Peter Walch, and Thomas Barrow, University of
New Mexico Press, 1986
Reverend C. H. Townshend Bequest Registered File, Victoria
and Albert Archive.TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY
The link between photographic practice and the activ-
ity and experience of travel was forged before Louis
Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s process was announced
to the Parisian public in 1839. The symbolic meeting
of activities occurred at the meeting in 1838 of two
principals when the eminent geographer and explorer
Alexander von Humboldt visited Daguerre in his studio.
Humboldt met with Daguerre in the geographer’s role as
member of the committee appointed by the Academie
des Sciences to evaluate Daguerre’s claim that he had
perfected a process to record and fi x through chemical
means the images produced in the camera obscura. As
Schwartz argues: “at a time when travel was embraced
as a way of seeing and knowing the world, photographs
offered a new means of acquiring, ordering, and dis-
seminating geographical information” (Schwartz, 1996,
16). Travel was the primary means of gathering the
empirical knowledge of the world; travelers’ accounts
supported by printed illustrations based on sketches,
topographic views, and maps produced during the course
of travel disseminated that knowledge. The emphasis
on travel as a mode to acquire knowledge is part of the
nineteenth-century emphasis on collecting, categorizing,
and possessing the world associated with the sciences
of geography, anthropology, and archaeology. After the
introduction of photographic processes, whether as per-
manent image on metal plate or paper print, photography
became the preferred and trusted mode of creating and
presenting the visual records of travel because it was
derived from the “neutral” operations of chemistry and
optics. Later, travel as a method of empirical knowledge
pursued by a relatively small cadre of explorers gave
way to travel as part of the burgeoning activity and
industry of tourism—the organized consumption of
place as leisure activity. Photography participated in the
change to touristic consumption as a record and valida-
tion of leisure travel and by creating and amplifying the
desire to participate in leisure travel activities.
The fi rst practitioners of travel photography were
amateur enthusiasts who pursued their interests in the
new technology of image making as they undertook
travels for offi cial, commercial, or personal interests.
Joly de Lotbinière and Frederic Goupil-Fesquet sepa-