Hannavy_RT72353_C000v1.indd

(Wang) #1

406


for over 30 years. In addition, he offered his services as
an occasional instructor at the Photographic Institution
in New Bond Street.
He continued to publish extensively, working some-
times alone, and sometimes with Cundall. Together they
illustrated A Photographic Tour Among the Abbeys of
Yorkshire published by Bell and Dalby in London in
1856.
The majority of his publications after 1855, however,
were concerned with drawing, glass painting, engraving
and with illustrating art history.
Many of his early photographically illustrated books
are held in the British Library.
John Hannavy


Biography


Philip Henry Delamotte was born in London in 1820,
the son of the painter and William de la Motte, then the
drawing master at the military academy at Sandhurst. He
also studied art and was an accomplished and published
lithographer by the age of 30. Taking up photography in
the late 1840s, he experimented fi rst with the calotype
and waxed paper processes before turning to wet col-
lodion for his photography of the Crystal Palace. His
manual The Practice of Photography was published in
1853, and a pamphlet The Oxymel Process in Photog-
raphy followed three years later. He was Professor of
Drawing and Perspective at King’s College, and King’s
College School, London, a post he held from 1855
until 1887. His book The Art of Sketching from Nature
was published by Bell and Dalby in 1871. Although he
continued to exhibit photographs, after 1859 his publica-
tions were all concerned with drawing except the two-
volume Holland House by Princess Marie Lichtenstein
in 1874, for the special edition of which he produced 37
Woodburytypes. Delamotte died in 1889.


See also: Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of All Nations, Crystal Palace, Hyde Park (1851);
Calotype and Talbotype; Wet Collodion Positive
Processes; Cundall, Joseph; Fenton, Roger; Bedford,
Francis; Talbot, William Henry Fox; le Gray, Gustave;
and Diamond, Hugh Welch.


Further Reading


Buerger, Janet E., (ed.), The Crystal Palace: Photographs by
Philip H. Delamotte, Rochester, New York, International
Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1981.
Delamotte, P. H., The Practice of Photography: A Manual for
Students and Amateurs, London: Cundall, 1853.
Delamotte, P. H., The Oxymel Process in Photography; For the
Use of Tourists, London, Chapman and Hall, 1856.
Delamotte, P. H., & Cundall, Joseph, A Photographic Tour Among
the Abbeys of Yorkshire, London: Bell and Dalby, 1856.


DELAROCHE, HIPPOLYTE (PAUL)
(1797–1856)
French painter
Delaroche was born in Paris on 17 July 1797, the sec-
ond son of parents who were well connected in artistic
circles. His father Grégoire-Hippolyte was a picture-
dealer and collector who held an offi cial position at
the Mont de Piété, the state pawnbroking institution.
Through his mother, Marie-Cathérine Bégat, he was
related to Adrien-Jacques Joly, the curator of the Print
department of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Both he and
his elder brother, Jules-Hippolyte (1795–1849) were
directed to an artistic career by their father. However
the privilege of training in the more prestigious genre
of history painting went to Jules, who entered the studio
of Antoine-Jean Gros in 1816. Paul (so called from his
childhood onwards) was placed in the studio of Louis
Watelet to train as a landscape painter, and classed
fi fth in the fi rst Prix de Rome for historical landscape
in 1818. It soon appeared that he was more talented
than his brother, but not in the domain of landscape.
He transferred to Gros’s studio, and rapidly made his
mark among a group of peers which included the English
painter Richard Parkes Bonington and the pioneering
lithographer, Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet.
Delaroche’s fi rst showing at the Paris Salon was
in 1822, where he gained the approval of the dying
Théodore Géricault for his Joas sauvé. He achieved
wide-spread recognition for his Joan of Arc at the 1824
Salon, with Stendhal predicting that he would soon make
his reputation. A visit to England in 1827 helped him to
improve his knowledge of the visual sources for British
history, which was in vogue in Paris at the time, as a
result of the popularity of Walter Scott’s novels. A direct
outcome was his Death of Elizabeth (1828), showing the
dying English Queen attended by her courtiers. After
the elder branch of the Bourbons had been expelled in
the July Revolution of 1830, Delaroche distinguished
himself with two major examples of historical genre for
the 1831 Salon. His Princes in the Tower drew on Eng-
lish illustrations to Shakespeare’s Richard III, and his
Cromwell and Charles I used Chateaubriand’s account
of the English Civil war to present a pictorial medita-
tion on the morality of revolutions. The critic Horace de
Viel-Castel wrote of visitors pausing ‘for whole hours’
before the spectacle of the decapitated king.
Delaroche’s prominence among the Romantic gen-
eration of French artists received offi cial recognition
when he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts
in 1832, at the ununusually early age of 35. In 1833, he
accepted the post of Professor at the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts, and began to direct one of the most successful
studios in Paris. Together with Horace Vernet, who

DELAMOTTE, PHILIP HENRY

Free download pdf