1386
In April 1859 Thompson became a full employee
of the Museum on a retainer of an annual fee of one
hundred pounds. Although obliged to be at the call of
the Museum, he was not prohibited from engaging in
private work. Partly in order to keep up with demand,
he concentrated on making negatives only at the Mu-
seum. In addition to his retainer he received 3d for every
square inch of negative. A further reason for Thompson’s
concentration on making negatives only was as a reac-
tion to a debate brewing between the Museum and the
private trade. Objections were raised that the Museum
was undercutting the general trader by selling exclusive
reproductions of works of art that were fi nanced by pub-
lic funds. Furthermore, because of Thompson’s offi cial
employment, private photographers were discouraged
from working in the Museum. The issue of safety to Mu-
seum objects complicated the issue. At the British Mu-
seum, where Roger Fenton had worked as a freelancer,
an accidental fi re caused by another photographer had
led the trustees to prohibit anyone but the photographer
approved by them to work on the premises. This, and
the fact of the existence of an established negative store
and printing establishment at South Kensington, led to
the British Museum’s arrangement with Fenton being
discontinued and all photography for both Museums
being transferred to South Kensington.
A Select Committee of the House of Commons was
set up to enquire on the issues. The minutes of evidence
published with the Committee’s report in 1860 give a
fascinating insight through photographers’ testimonies.
It was decided that the appointment of an individual or
fi rm to the Museum was necessary for the smooth run-
ning of a Museum photographic department. However, A
Committee on Education passed a minute on 10 January
1862 stating that photographs from negatives produced
from objects of art being public property should be sold
through channels of trade.
Thompson was industrious photographing a huge
variety of objects at the Museum. It is estimated that
he produced in the region of 10,000 negatives. A Price
List of Mounted Photographs printed from negatives
taken for the Science and Art Department by the Of-
fi cial Photographer C. Thurston Thompson (London:
Chapman and Hall) dated 1864, lists nearly one thou-
sand different photographs. These include categories
such as Italian sculpture, arms and armour, engraved
ornament, cartoons and drawings of Raphael, portraits
by Holbein in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle,
Limoge enamels, ivory carvings, objects in crystal in
the Louvre, Turner’s Liber Studiorum, and trees stud-
ies. Prints could be obtained through the photographic
fi rms of Chapman & Hall, P. & D. Colnaghi, Scott and
Co. and Cundall, Downes & Co. The public could also
request images to be made of objects in the Museum
not already photographed.
In 1866, Thompson left on a tour of Spain and
Portugal to photograph works of art and architecture.
John Charles Robinson, curator of the South Kensing-
ton Museum, had visited the Cathedral of Santiago de
Compostella in Spain the year before. He singled out
the cathedral’s Romanesque doorway, the Portico de la
Gloria, for special treatment commissioning a gigantic
plaster cast of the whole structure to be shipped to the
Museum. He also asked for Thompson to photograph the
site, so that the photographs could be shown alongside
the plaster cast, showing the context of the doorway.
Robinson left precise instructions for Thompson down
to placing the camera ‘betwixt the 9th and 10th trees
at the roadside.’ However, Thompson went beyond his
brief, photographing the crypt, and the tribune above
the Portico de la Gloria and views of the Puerta de
las Platerias. In 1868 the Arundel Society published
a volume of the photographs that brought the hitherto
largely unknown cathedral to the attention of scholars
and played a central role in raising interest in Spanish
antiquities in the later 19th century. His photographs
of Portugal were exhibited in the Portuguese section of
the Universal Exhibition of Paris, 1867 and the Arundel
Society published, The Sculpted Ornament of the Mon-
astery of Batalha, 1868.
Thompson was described as “a man of extensive and
varied art culture, possessing a most discriminate taste
and judgement; but, withal, modest and unassuming. As
a private friend he was a rarely amiable man, possessing
and unusually winning and conciliatory deportment”
(The Photographic News, Vol. XII, no.490, 24 January
1868, 38.). Late in 1867 he stayed in Paris to assist with
the photographic section of the British portion of the
exhibition. While there he suffered severe attacks of
jaundice and died on 20 January 1868 aged fi fty-two.
Martin BarnesBiography
Charles Thurston Thompson was born in 1816 and
trained with his father as a wood engraver. In his early
thirties he turned to photography and began practising
the wet collodion technique around 1851. The same
year, Thompson assisted with the arrangements for
photography at the Great Exhibition in London. He
worked with the photographer Robert Bingham on the
production of the photographic prints for the Reports
by the Juries of the Great Exhibition (1851) and in 1852
worked with him in his studio in Paris. On returning to
London in 1853 Thompson was employed by the newly
founded South Kensington Museum (later renamed the
Victoria and Albert Museum) fi rst as a freelancer and
from 1859 as offi cial photographer, the fi rst post of its
kind. He made thousands of negatives of objects in the
Museum and of artworks in other public and private col-