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Frederick Hollyer lived with his eldest son at Blewbury,
Berkshire, where he died at the age of ninety-fi ve on
21 November 1933. The funeral took place at Reigate
Cemetery on 24 November.
Martin Barnes
Biography
Frederick Hollyer was born in London in 1837. In 1870
he opened a studio in London. Most of Hollyer’s output
reproduced the work of his artist contemporaries among
whom were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederic Leighton,
G. F. Watts, Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones.
Hollyer’s fi ne platinum print reproductions were highly
regarded and did much to popularise the artists’ works
in Britain and abroad. Alongside this work Hollyer also
made a great many revealing and intimate portraits.
His subjects included many of the most important ar-
tistic, literary and society fi gures of the day. He also
made landscape photographs, among them views of the
Thames, some of which were reproduced in an illustrated
interview with him in The Studio (1893). Hollyer prided
himself on his immaculate technical skills and advocated
making ‘untouched’ negatives and prints (i.e. images
which had not been altered by retouching at any stage
during the photographic process). In 1893 he became a
member of the Linked Ring and in 1895. He retired from
active work in 1913 and died at Blewbury, Berkshire, the
age of ninety-fi ve on 21 November 1933.
Collections
National Media Museum, UK: 60 platinum prints,
mostly portraits, some London scenes. Sales cata-
logue, letters, press cuttings.
Victoria and Albert Museum, UK: numerous reproduc-
tions of artworks, vertical panorama fl ower study,
portraits of Morris and Burne-Jones families, three
albums Portraits of Many Persons of Note Photo-
graphed by Frederick Hollyer.
University of Middlesex, Silver Studios archive, London
UK: collodion and gelatin dry-plate negatives.
Jewish Museum, London, UK: Photographs of works
by Simeon Solomon, Eight Designs for the Song of
Songs by Simeon Solomon (1878) and The Book of
Ruth (1879).
See also: Photography in Art Conservation;
Photography of Paintings; and Photography of
Sculpture.
Further Reading
Bate, Percy, “A Note on the Art of Simeon Solomon.” Catalogue
of Platinotype Reproductions of Pictures &c. Photographed
and Sold by Mr. Hollyer No. 9 Pembroke Sqr., London, W,
London: Frederick Hollyer, 1909.
Browne, T. and Parton, E. (eds.), Macmillan Biographical Ency-
clopaedia of Photographic Artists and Innovators, London:
1983, 283–4.
Hollyer, Frederick, “Platinotype Printing,” Journal of The Pho-
tographic Society, XVIII, 1894, 317.
Townshend, Horace, “An Interview with Mr. Frederick Hollyer,”
The Studio, vol.1, 1893, 192–196
Townsend, Horace (preface), Catalogue of Reproductions of Pic-
tures & Sculpture Photographed and Sold by Mr. F. Hollyer,
no. 9, Pembroke Sqr., London, W.8., London: 1924.
Mr. Frederick Hollyer’s exhibition of platinotype reproductions.
Catalogue of platinotype reproductions of the works of Sir
E. Burne-Jones, D. G. Rossetti, G. F. Watts, R.A., and other
masters: of portraits of eminent men by various painters: and
of portraits from life by Frederick Hollyer. Also platinotype
reproductions of the works of Botticelli and other masters in
Florence, The Hague, and other places by Frederick T. Hol-
lyer, London: Drawing Room, Egyptian Hall, 27 January–1
March, 1902.
The Times, Obituary, 24 November, 1933.HOLMES, SILAS A. (1817–1886)
By 1851 Holmes had moved from his native Petersburg,
New York and established himself in New York City
in his fi rst (of several) photographic studio on lower
Broadway, alongside most of the principal photog-
raphers of that period. Although in the middle 1850s
he made highly praised oversize ambrotype views of
Niagara Falls, he is better known and more highly val-
ued for his urban imagery like the handsome studies
of the principal streets and monuments of New York,
which he rendered as salted paper prints, about eleven
by fi fteen inches in size, and, sometimes. blindstamped
“Holmes photographist.” His productions in other for-
mats included albumen print cartes-de-visite, among
them one of Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and
oversize cabinet cards of varying subjects ranging from
the bridges of Central Park to the Catskill Mountains.
In the 1860s he advertised three hundred stereoscopic
views of Manhattan and its surrounds including “in-
numerable objects of interest surrounding this great
city,” while in the 1870s his subjects ranged northward
to Saratoga Springs.
As well as by consistently exhibiting his work in vari-
ous processes and formats, Holmes’s industriousness
and inventiveness were manifested by his patent for a
stereoscopic camera and his 1885 publication of Our
Democracy, a book devoted to solving the problems of
“Labor and Capital.”
Gordon BaldwinHOLTERMAN, BERNARD (1838–1885)
German photographerBernard Holterman was born 29 April 1838 in Hamburg,
Germany. Migrating to Sydney in 1858 Holterman
worked a variety of jobs before teaming up with Louis