1385
THOMPSON, CHARLES THURSTON
(1816–1868)
British photographer, offi cial photographer to the
South Kensington Museum and Department of
Science and Art
Charles Thurston Thompson was born in 1816, the son
of a wood engraver, John Thompson. Charles took up
his father’s profession under his tuition. With his father
he drew and engraved many of the illustrations for
William Yarrell’s A History of British Birds (1843). In
his early thirties he turned to photography and began
practising the wet collodion technique around the time
it was introduced in 1851. The same year, Thompson
assisted Henry Cole, civil servant and Chairman of the
Fine Arts Committee of the Society of Arts, with the
arrangements for photography at the Great Exhibition
in London. Thompson worked with the photographer
Robert Bingham on the production of the photographic
prints for the Reports by the Juries of the Great Exhibi-
tion (1851) and in 1852 worked with him in his studio
in Paris.
Out of the proceeds of the Great Exhibition and with
government help, land was purchased in the area south
of Hyde Park, for the establishment of the new South
Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria and Al-
bert Museum). Henry Cole, later to become Thompson’s
brother-in law, was appointed fi rst director. The Museum
offi cers were keenly aware of the possibilities that pho-
tography could play in the development and promotion
of museum activities and collections. Thompson was
called upon by the Museum as a freelancer to produce
photographs of objects on loan to an exhibition of
decorative furniture held at the Museum’s temporary
accommodation at Gore House in 1853. In the gardens
he photographed the Venetian Mirror c.1700 from the
Collection of John Webb (1853, V&A collection), along
with other studies of mirrors, showing himself refl ected
in the glass. Usually, such photographs had the mirror
glass obscured during exposure or blacked out in the
printing to remove the refl ection. Thompson’s images of
mirrors reveal the processes of early object photography
and suggest that he was consciously showing himself
at work in the new-founded profession of Museum
photographer.
In 1855 Thompson was appointed superintendent
of the British photographic contributions to the Paris
Exposition Universelle and travelled there to work with
Bingham on photographing the exhibition and its build-
ings. While there he was granted special permission by
the French government to photograph art objects in the
Louvre. On his return to London in 1856 Thompson
submitted works for the exhibition of the Photographic
Society of London. That same year he was appointed
offi cial photographer to the South Kensington Museum
and the Department of Science and Art thus establishing
the earliest Museum photographic service in the world.
Thompson photographed not only Museum objects
but also made pictures of the construction of the new
museum. Non-commissioned military offi cers of the
Royal Engineers, or ‘sappers,’ contributed to many
aspects of the Museum’s operations and were enlisted
to assist Thompson in photography as they had done
previously during the Great Exhibition. Thompson
was formally appointed by the War Department to
teach photography to the Royal Engineers in 1856 for
which he was paid ten guineas when each soldier was
granted a certifi cate of profi ciency. Their photographic
skills were subsequently of great use to the military in
documenting terrain in many corners of the world and
in reproducing Ordnance Survey maps.
On the completion of its main buildings the Museum
re-opened at South Kensington in 1857 and Thompson’s
studio was set up at the site. In July he returned to Paris
to purchase a lens suitable for photographing the size-
able Raphael Cartoons then housed at Hampton Court
Palace prior to their removal and display at the Museum.
A special camera was constructed to accommodate
large glass negatives measuring 30 × 48 inches (76 ×
122 cm). Only full daylight was suffi cient to obtain
the correct exposure so a method of photographing the
fragile works on paper in the outdoors was devised: they
would be hung out of the windows at the Palace on fi ne
days. This work continued throughout 1858. The prints
were offered for sale to the public but they also proved
useful to the Museum staff who marked the prints with
diagrams to identify areas of the original cartoons requir-
ing treatment—possibly the fi rst use of photography for
conservation purposes. The negatives and marked prints
remain in the V&A collection.
The same year Thompson photographed the Exhi-
bition of the Photographic Society of London and the
Société française de photographie held at the South
Kensington Museum (V&A collection). This image
is an important record of the appearance of early pho-
tographic exhibitions with stereoscopes on tables and
pictures hung fl oor to ceiling, frame to frame. A fi gure
seated is likely to be Thompson himself. Three of his
works, tree studies made in Surrey probably taken in
1857 or 1858, are visible in the exhibition. His system-
atic representation of trees was intended to be of use to
the Museum in its capacity as a source of inspiration
for artists and designers. They served as studies from
which students could copy, much like Edward Fox’s
Anatomy of Foliage acquired by the Museum for the
same purpose in 1865. Thompson’s tree studies survive,
along with many of his other works, pasted into the
Museum’s ‘guard books’—bound volumes containing
one print from every negative made for the Museum
photographic service (V&A Archive).