1515
Living Artists, Taken in the Style of the Old Masters, by
An Amateur in the late spring of 1864; each issue sold
for a guinea and included four photographs in the style
of a continental school. The Studio attracted little notice
in the photographic press, and two positive notices in
more general periodicals, The Reader and the Illustrated
London News, seem to have been insuffi cient to encour-
age future publication and indeed Wynfi eld withdrew
the images from circulation about six months after their
initial exhibition.
Wynfi eld’s photographic portraits comprise a consis-
tent body of work. All are albumen prints from wet-col-
lodion negatives on 8 × 6-inch plates, and all except one
are busts of male sitters (the exception is a head study of
his sister Annie Yeames). The sitters occupy very shal-
low spaces, before backgrounds that function mainly as
patterns of light and dark, setting off corresponding fea-
tures in the heads or clothing. Most of the costumes refer
to the fi fteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries, and
often bear some connection to the subject: for example
Marks, painter of many Shakespearean subjects, appears
in Elizabethan costume. Wynfi eld made many visual ref-
erences to Holbein and Van Dyck, but did not re-create
specifi c works and frequently combined elements from
various styles and periods in a single image. Most sit-
ters were Wynfi eld’s contemporaries and friends, many
of whom had yet to make their reputations at the time
they were photographed. Associating his fellow artists
with the Old Masters, Wynfi eld projected their shared
desire to be seen as humanists who could bridge past
and present, soul and intellect, commerce and nobility,
fame and its renunciation. He also expressed, much more
clearly than in his paintings, the notions of breadth and
idealism then attached to the Old Masters—qualities
that stood in direct opposition to the focus, detail, and
specifi city that characterized most genre paintings and
all commercial photographic portraiture. As seen from
the perspective of a generalist art critic of the 1860s,
David Octavius Hill was photography’s Old Master,
and Wynfi eld a worthy heir. The Photographic Society
of London, meanwhile, was inhospitable to a practice
they saw as insuffi ciently advanced technically and
therefore unworthy of institutionalization. Wynfi eld
never became a regular participant in the Society’s an-
nual exhibitions.
The relationship between Wynfi eld’s painted and
photographic production is far from straightforward.
In appearance and construction they are totally differ-
ent—and indeed Wynfi eld must have been concerned
to avoid the charge that he relied on photographs when
composing his paintings—but both were motivated by a
vision of the literary and historical past. Assessment of
Wynfi eld’s achievement has been compromised by as-
sociation with Julia Margaret Cameron, who approached
him as a pupil in 1864 and later declared that “to his
beautiful photography I owe all my attempts and indeed
consequently all my successes.” There is no doubt that
Wynfi eld’s photographs exhibit, in fact pioneered, many
of the qualities now associated with Cameron’s work,
such as close-up format, soft focus, impressionistic at-
mosphere, and strong chiaroscuro. Historians—follow-
ing the lead of nineteenth-century commentators—have
applied the label of “amateur” positively to Cameron,
using it to imply freedom from convention; with regard
to Wynfi eld the term seems pejoratively to connote dilet-
tantism, frivolity, and technical ineptitude.
Wynfi eld’s abandonment of photography is as un-
documented as his embrace of it. It is not known if
he continued to make photographs into the 1870s and
1880s. He died of tuberculosis in 1887, at age forty-
nine. Examples of his portraits are found at the Royal
Academy of Arts (given by his fellow artist and brother-
in-law W. F. Yeames), the National Portrait Gallery, and
the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Britt SalvesenBiography
David Wilkie Wynfi eld was born in India in 1837, the
namesake of his mother’s uncle and adoptive father, theWYNFIELD, DAVID WILKIE
Wynfi eld, David Wilkie. George Grederick Watts.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Warner Communications
Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977 (1977.537) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.