404
there is no indication that he produced other albums,
exhibited his pictures, or took up the camera again after
- A few of his prints appear in an album assembled
by Victor Regnault and in another published by Blan-
quart-Evrard. Apart from a brief political career in the
1870s, Delagrange devoted most of his life to manag-
ing his considerable fortune. He died in his chateau at
Sebourg 11 February 1917.
See also: Survey photography; Tripe, Linnaeus; and
Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré.
Further Reading
Ballerini, Julia, “A Frenchman’s Views of British India, 1850:
The Photographic Albums of Baron Alexis Delagrange” in
Monuments of India: Photographs and the Making of History,
edited by Antonella Pelizzari, Montreal: Canadian Center for
Architecture, 2003.
Dictionnaire de biographie française, Paris: Letouzey, 1997.
Gautrand, Jean-Claude and Alain Buisine, Blanquart-Evrard, Pas-
de-Calais: Centre Régional de la Photographie Nord, 1999.
Lambrecht, Félix, Souvenirs, Paris: Chamerot, 1873.
Marbot, Bernard, Amina Okada and Pierre-Lin Renié, L’Inde:
Photographies de Louis Rousselet 1865-1868, Bordeaux,
Musée Goupil, 1992.
Perez, Nissan N, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East
1839–1885, New York: Abrams, 1988.
DELAMOTTE, PHILIP HENRY
(1820–1889)
British photographer, author, and teacher
One photographic commission dominates the career
of Philip Henry Delamotte—the photography of the
dismantling of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park after the
Great Exhibition of 1851, and its rebuilding on a new
site at Sydenham, Kent, England.
The decision to engage a photographer to record
the progress of the project initiated one of the fi rst
major industrial photography commissions in Britain.
The resulting body of work is tangible evidence of the
heightening of photography’s profi le immediately fol-
lowing the Great Exhibition itself, and certainly since
the original construction of Joseph Paxton’s masterpiece
in Hyde Park. While there was little enthusiasm for
photography during the original construction, the re-
building, opening, and contents of the Sydenham Crystal
Palace were all covered by a number of photographers,
and commercially exploited by Negretti and Zambra
and others.
By the time of the Crystal Palace commission,
Delamotte was already an accomplished photographer,
having been introduced to the calotype process in the
late 1840s. By the early 1850s he was advertising his
services both as a photographic printer and as a portrait
photographer, claiming in 1853 to have made arrange-
ments with William Henry Fox Talbot—described as
“the Patentee”—to practise Scott Archer’s newly dis-
covered wet collodion process. Many photographers
at that time agreed to acknowledge Talbot’s claimed
patent interests in all negative/positive processes rather
than risk litigation, until a later court case clarifi ed the
matter.
Through both his early contact with the calotype pro-
cess and his associations with the art world, he became
acquainted with Roger Fenton, Francis Bedford and
photographer/publisher Joseph Cundall, and through a
shared interest in antiquity, he became a friend of Dr
Hugh Welch Diamond. Many of these early associations
and friendships would result in collaborations later in
his career.
Delamotte was the son of the landscape painter and
lithographer William De La Motte, and during his career
adopted two alternative styles for his name. As an art-
ist and an engraver, in his fi rst two publications On the
Various Applications of Anastatic Printing and Papyrog-
raphy (1849) and Choice Examples of Art Workmanship
Selected from the Exhibition of Ancient and Mediaeval
Art at the Society of Arts (1853) he styled himself Philip
DelaMotte. However, for the fi rst edition of his book
The Practice of Photography; a Manual for Students
and Amateurs, also published in 1853, he used the style
Delamotte, under which name all his subsequent work
seems to have been published. That volume drew on
his friendships with fellow photographers, including
details of processes used by Talbot, le Gray, Cundall,
Diamond and others.
The earliest recorded account of the publication of
any of his photographs comes in an 1852 review in The
Atheneum of two of his images in parts I and II of The
Photographic Album.
That he was already an accomplished photographer
and recognised authority on photographic processes is
evidenced by the 1853 publication of The Practice of
Photography—which would subsequently run to three
editions. Curiously, that volume proclaims that it contains
“a calotype portrait taken by the collodion process”!
When the British Museum was seeking in 1853 to
establish a “photographic room”—which would later
lead to the appointment of Roger Fenton as Museum
Photographer—it was to Delamotte that the trustees
initially turned for advice on the construction and equip-
ping of the facility.
The publication of Photographic Views of the Prog-
ress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham in London in
1855 was Delamotte’s third publication on the subject,
but his fi rst to be illustrated with original photographs
rather than his drawings, or engravings derived from his
photographs. In all 160 images were published in the