107107
BALDUS, ÈDOUARD
tor Hugo taken in 1862, on which occasion Bacot also
executed a series of stereoscopic views of the exiled
writer’s Guernsey residence, Hauteville House.
Malcolm Daniel
BAKER AND CO, F. W.
(active 1850s–1860s)
A prolifi c commercial photographer in Northern India
from the mid-1850s until the end of the 1860s, Baker
appears to have arrived in Calcutta in around 1855,
as an employee of the millinery fi rm of Appleton and
Co. He was also, however, concurrently managing the
daguerreotype studio of James William Newland and in
August 1857, on his return from a photographic tour of
the North West Provinces, he established his own busi-
ness in Calcutta under the title of Baker’s Daguerrean
Rooms. The studio fl ourished throughout the 1860s, in
due course changing its name to the Calcutta Photo-
graphic Company. While Baker produced the standard
commercial fare of portraits and topographical views
for the European market, the studio’s most historically
signifi cant work remains its extensive documentation
of the devastating cyclone which struck Calcutta in
- Baker appears to have abandoned photography
completely in 1869, when his negative stock was sold
to the fi rm of Saché and Westfi eld, returning to his early
trade as a milliner in the partnership of Baker and Catliff.
Between 1887 and 1896 he was resident in Rangoon
and although his date of death or departure from India
has not been established, he appears to have still been
living in Calcutta as late as 1908.
John FalconerBALDI, GREGOR (1814–1878) AND
WÜRTHLE, KARL FRIEDRICH (1820–
1902)
Born in Telve, South-Tirol, Austria, Gregor Baldi
started work as an arts and crafts dealer in his broth-
ers shop in Linz, Upper-Austria at the age of 15. From
c. 1842–1861 he had his own successful art-shop in
Salzburg. He edited nine albums with steel-engravings
of topographic studies, some made by Karl Friedrich
Würthle, born Konstanz, Germany.
In January 1862 they established Baldi & Würthle in
a purpose-built studio in Riedenburg Nr. 17, a suburb
of Salzburg.
In 1866 the studio was moved to Schwarzstraße near
the theatre. They made studio-portraits and groups in
albumen and later gelatine. But the most numerous
subjects were hundreds of location photographs of
Salzburg-town and landscape and mountain-photos of
country areas in Salzburg and his neighbourhood, now
housed in the Salzburger Museum Carolino Augusteum.
These photos were produced in a range of sizes from
carte-de-visite to 370 × 570 mm, and, from 1866, pan-
oramas (230 × 530 mm).
From 1874 they operated separate studios, with
Würthle moving to Schwarzstraße 11. From 1875 to 1880
Würthle alone was the owner of the studio of which the
name remained ‘Baldi & Würthle.’ From 1881 to 1892
the atelier ‘Würthle & Spinnhirn’ belonged to Würthle
and his brother-in-law Hermann Spinnhirn, a chemist.
From 1892 to 1904 the studio name was ‘Würthle
& Son,’ out of which they photographed and published
images.
‘Baldi & Würthle’ and their successors were the fi rst
fully professional, important and well known photogra-
phers in the capital town of Salzburg and other western
countries of the Austrian empire and remained so until
about 1900.
Erhard KoppensteinerBALDUS, ÉDOUARD (1813–1889)
French photographer
Édouard Baldus arrived in Paris to study painting in
1838 at the age of twenty-fi ve, shortly before the fi rst
public announcement of photography’s invention. HeBacot, Edmond. Saint-Maclou, Rouen.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund,
1995 (1995.96.10) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.