717
her home and she took many informally but artfully
posed portraits of her husband and his male friends in a
simply constructed ‘studio’ on her veranda. In 1866 the
How’s left their home following a downturn in business
and little more is known of their lives. Louisa does not
appear to have continued with photography and died in
1893 at the age of seventy-two.
Isobel Crombie
HOWLETT, ROBERT (1830–1858)
British photographer
Robert Howlett’s tragically short life and brief career
nevertheless yielded some of the most signifi cant pho-
tographs of the 19th century. In particular, his image of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Launching Chains of
the Great Eastern (1857) has become one of the icons
of an era and is one of the fi rst and fi nest examples of
environmental portraiture. Despite the fame of his im-
ages however, Howlett’s origins remain illusive. His
father was a clergyman, Reverend Robert Howlett, of
Longham, Norfolk. Nothing has been traced to date
about his mother, education or early life.
Unlike many of the early gentleman-amateur photog-
raphers of his time Howlett is not recorded as having
any other activity and can therefore be considered to
be one of the fi rst to have taken up photography as a
profession exclusively from the start. It is known that
he began making photographs in 1852 and very soon
thereafter was employed at the Photographic Institu-
tion, 168 New Bond Street, London, a centre for the
commercial promotion of photography, established in
1853 by Joseph Cundall and Phillip Delamotte. The
Institution was active in exhibitions, publications and
commissions and also housed a studio for portraiture.
Howlett’s name fi rst appears in the photographic press
in 1856. This and the following year were an incredibly
busy and productive period in which he came into pro-
fessional contact—no doubt through the well-connected
Photographic Institution—with eminent artists, royalty
and distinguished war heroes.
W.P. Frith commissioned Howlett to photograph
crowd scenes from the roof of a cab at the 1856 Derby
horse race at Epsom. The photographs were used by
Frith in preparation for his painting Derby Day (1858).
At the same period Howlett undertook the fi rst of a
number of commissions for Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert that included copying the works of Raphael.
Under Royal patronage he also made a series of portraits
of soldiers of the Crimean War that were shown at the
1857 Photographic Society of London’s annual exhibi-
tion under the title Crimean Heroes.
Howlett also contributed to the literature on pho-
tographic technique with, On the various methods of
printing photographic pictures upon paper with sug-
gestions for their preservation (London: S. Low, 1856).
This publication addressed the fear at the time about
the permanence of photographic prints, many of which
had begun to show signs of fading. Howlett is known
to have used W.H.F. Talbot’s calotype process though
most of his work was made using wet collodion on
glass negatives printed on albumen paper. Alongside the
commercial applications of the medium Howlett also
produced landscape photographs such as In the Valley of
the Mole, Mickleham and Box Hill, Surrey, 1855. These,
among others, he submitted to the annual exhibitionsHOWLETT, ROBERT
Howlett, Robert. The Bow of the Great
Eastern.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift,
2005 (2005.100.12) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.