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FOWKE, FRANCIS (1823–1865)
Captain Francis Fowke, RE, was a captain in the Royal
Engineers, but is primarily remembered as an architect.
He planned the International Exhibition in London
in 1862 and was responsible for the original designs
for, amongst other buildings, London’s Albert Hall,
Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Museum, and London’s
Natural History Museum, although that was modifi ed
and completed after Fowke’s death by the eminent ar-
chitect Alfred Waterhouse. Fowke also designed the fi rst
phase of London’s South Kensington Museum, which
evolved into the V&A.
Fowke’s interest in photography brought him to use
the medium to record aspects of the construction of his
buildings, and images survive showing such aspects as
the testing of the strength of new cement used in the
construction of brick arches during the construction of
the South Kensington Museum.
That interest in photography can be traced back to the
early 1850s, and by 1856 he had designed and patented
a novel compact folding camera for his own use. The
camera was used by several military, and government-
employed, photographers. It was later manufactured
and marketed by Ottewill as an ideal instrument for
the travelling photographer, due to its ability to be col-
lapsed into a very compact form. Built of teak, the solid
wooden design, however, was superseded by Kinnear’s
lightweight design using folding bellows.
John Hananvy
FOX, EDWARD (1823–C. 1899)
British landscape and architectural photographer
Fox was born, probably in London or Sussex, England
in 1823. He was the eldest of four brothers. His mother,
Sarah, was a milliner. His father, also named Edward,
was a painter and printmaker of picturesque landscapes
who specialised in views of Brighton and its surround-
ing topography. Edward Fox senior exhibited paintings
frequently at the Royal Academy from 1813, and at the
British Institution from 1820, until the early 1850s. The
young Edward followed his father in the arts and is listed
in the 1851 census at the family address in Middlesex
Street, St. Ann’s, Sussex, as a “decorative painter.”
However, by 1861 the census lists him in Brighton as
an “artist-designer, photographer.” His earliest known
photographs are calotypes dating from around 1856.
Fox took as subjects many of the local scenes of
Brighton and the outlying villages, towns and landscapes
painted by his father. In Brighton he photographed the
street scenes, fi shing boats and fi sher-folk on the beach,
shops, civic buildings, hotels, churches, the Theatre
Royal and the Royal Pavilion. These images constitute
the earliest comprehensive photographic survey of the
town and are important historical documents. He also
made many calotypes of a picturesque character in Sus-
sex localities such as Mayfi eld, Bramber, Shoreham,
Ditchling, Preston, Battle, Rottingdean and Chichester.
Up until around 1860 he printed on albumen paper from
calotype negatives and thereafter began using wet col-
lodion on glass negatives. He used various sized nega-
tives ranging from 12.7 × 10 cm (5 × 4 in); 17.8 × 22.8
cm (7 × 9 in); 21.6 × 28 .5 (8.5 × 11.25 in) and 16.5 ×
19 cm (6.5 × 7.5 in). A series of views of Brighton’s
Marine Parade, King’s Road and beach exist trimmed
to a panoramic format.
Sometime in the early 1860s he set up a photographic
business at 44 Market Street, Brighton from where he
promoted himself as a “Landscape and Architectural
Photographer” as the stamp on some of his prints shows.
He registered the copyright of many of his photographs
from 1862. Some of these are reproductions of paintings.
However his commercial activity encompassed work
of a primarily documentary nature of local interest and
also artistic photography. Some of Fox’s architectural
photographs appear to document the recent comple-
tion of buildings. It is possible that these were made as
sources for engravings or lithographs in the architectural
press. An auction announcement for the sale of the villa
and gardens of Queen’s Park estate Brighton, 1863, is
illustrated with lithographs credited as from photographs
by Fox (V&A Photography Collection fi les). He also
issued stereographs and topographical cartes-de-viste.
These reveal his eye for newsworthy subjects. In 1860
he photographed the beached hull of the French brig
Atlantique of Nantes which was wrecked off the Albion
Hotel, Brighton. At the marriage of the Prince of Wales
in 1863 he documented Brighton’s Market Street decked
out with bunting. Fox must have hoped that these and
other subjects, in accessible stereograph and carte-de-
visite formats, would have a wide commercial and local
appeal. Presumably he sold many copies but very few
examples have since come to light.
Fox’s more artistic intentions are shown in what ap-
pears to be a personal album (private collection, London)
made around 1864. It shows the village of Mayfi eld, its
half-timbered buildings, the ruins of the archbishop’s
palace and scenes of haymaking, evocatively inscribed
“E. Fox. Studies of Effect.” His ambitions of this kind
were captured most fully in his “instantaneous photo-
graphs” of sea and sky made in an oval format in 1865.
Gustave Le Gray had pioneered the notion and image
of the instantaneous photographic seascape during the
mid-1850s in France yet few British photographers met
the challenge as well as Fox. It is likely Fox’s seascapes
that were shown at the Photographic Society Exhibition
in November 1869 and described by the Photographic
Journal (vol. XIV, 172) as “Foreground and Cloud
studies.”