1214
William White Rouch was a chemist and appears to
have been the driving force behind the business. The fi rm
was the wholesale agent for T. Frederick Hardwich’s
negative and positive collodion from the late 1850s and
commenced dry plate manufacture from an early date.
It was also active in the manufacture of photographic
equipment advertising various forms of camera for
amateur and professional photographers. Rouch also
manufactured lenses and was an agent for the principal
British and European lens makers and it offered a range
of accessories for photography, chemicals and prepared
collodions and papers. W. W. Rouch registered a design
of portable camera with separate processing chamber in
1858 and the following year registered a portable dark
tent which was still being advertised in the 1880s. An
improved dark tent design was registered in 1861 and
a photographic shutter in 1862. W. W. Rouch died at
Mentone on 18 February 1871 aged 39.
A relation, Samuel White Rouch (died 1898) con-
tinued with the business. The Patent Portable camera
of 1878 was based on S. W. Rouch’s patent and proved
very popular. It was improved in 1885 and in 1891
and the fi rm announced that it was being widely used
by travellers and explorers including Henry Morton
Stanley.
Rouch also introduced a hand camera to meet the
demand for smaller, more portable cameras. The Eureka
was one of the most popular magazine plate cameras of
the later nineteenth century. It was based on Rouch’s
patents of 1887 and 1888 and the model was sold until
at least 1910. The rear section of the camera held a
number of plates (one model also made this interchange-
able) allowing multiple exposures to be made before
reloading.
Hand cameras aside, Rouch continued to offer older
designs of cameras and photographic equipment and,
increasingly, cameras from other makers. Its importance
consequently decreased and the fi rm traded mainly as a
retailer. After Samuel’s death in 1898 his son William
Albert Rouch continued to manage the business but his
interests lay more as a photographer and he built up a
successful career as a horse photographer illustrating
several books during the 1930s.
By 1914 the manufacturing and retailing business
had largely ceased and after the fi rst world war the W
W Rouch name continued as W. A. Rouch’s photo-
graphic studio and remained in existence until at least
the mid-1980s.
Michael Pritchard
Further Reading
Channing & Dunn, British Camera Makers. An A–Z Guide
to Companies and Products, Claygate: Parkland Designs,
1996.
ROUSSEAU, LOUIS (1811–1874)
French photographer
Born on February 23rd, 1811 in Paris (France), Louis
Pierre Rousseau pursued a lifetime career in the Museum
of Natural History, mainly as assistant naturalist in the
department of Malacology. He also took part in three
scientifi c journeys.
His talent for preparing and drawing specimens
contributed in the development of his interest in the
publication of scientifi c illustrations. After the project
of publishing a large number of engravings failed, he
eventually turned to photography in 1853.
With Achille Devéria, assistant curator in the French
national library, he undertook the publication by install-
ments of Photographie zoologique, sixty photographs
showing rare specimens from the Museum collections
(salted paper prints- negatives by Louis-Auguste and
Auguste-Rosalie Bisson and prints by Lemercier, and
later plates made by the photomechanical process of
Niépce de Saint-Victor). Despite constant praise for its
accuracy and beauty the project was never completed.
In 1854, Louis Rousseau took a series of portraits and
photographs of skulls for the anthropological gallery.
A founding member of the Société française de
photographie (November 15th, 1854), he received its
instructions for his journey to the North Seas in 1856,
where he made portraits of Inuit and Icelanders (col-
lodion). He is not known to have taken photographs
thereafter.
He died of an illness caught during one of his jour-
neys on October 14th, 1874 in Paris, after a long career
as a naturalist and a brief one as a photographer.
Caroline FieschiROYAL COLLECTION, WINDSOR
Members of the British Royal Family have collected
photographs since the 1840s. By 2005 these amounted
to hundreds of thousands of images, but it had not been
until the late 1960s that certain of them were classed as
a photograph collection, which was subsequently kept
in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle in England. By
2005 it numbered at least 350,000 images, of which
about a tenth had been acquired in the nineteenth
century.
The fi rst members of the Royal Family known to have
been aware of photography were Queen Victoria, and
more particularly her husband, Prince Albert, who took a
keen interest in the new medium. Both had artistic skills
and tastes, and were intrigued by new inventions. In
March 1842, while the Court was at Brighton, the Prince
had himself photographed by William Constable. The
Queen and the Prince soon recognised photography’s
potential uses, whether for recording people and places,