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itself was shaded by an overhead canopy as a giant lens
hood, and there were movable shades to all the windows
as well as portable screens. The walls of reception rooms
and dressing rooms were all covered by paintings and
enlargements of photographic portraits ‘to try to show
what photography can do in vieing with painting in the
production of large artistic portraits’. Sittings were rela-
tively expensive by the standards of other establishments
(although Pritchard thought the rate quite reasonable), at
a guinea (£1 1s) a time, which includedeighteen cartes
de visite or six cabinet-size prints. This price compared
with a cost of about half a guinea for a seat in the stalls
at a West End theatre. Many sitters, though, did not pay.
Instead they sat so that the company could sell prints
commercially, giving the sitters additional publicity and
Elliott & Fry useful income. This was an important side
of the business, not only through the sale of prints over
the counter but also through their sale for use to illustrate
books. Portraits of Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Joseph
Chamberlain, Matthew Arnold and Charles Darwin were
all published in books, as engravings or Woodburytypes.
Commercial prints were also used to attract new celeb-
rity clients, by sending them copies as samples of what
could be achieved, though not all were convinced: the
social reformer Samuel Smiles declined, saying that he
preferred to own the copyright in any portraits so that
he could control their use.
Sitters for Elliott & Fry included soldiers and states-
men, such as Lord Chelmsford, Gladstone, the Shah of
Persia and Bismarck, religious fi gures including bishops
and members of the Booth family, artists such as George
Cruikshank, Walter Crane and William Morris, writers
such as Mrs Humphrey Ward, Thomas Carlyle, Rudyard
Kipling and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, musicians such
as Clara Schumann and Edvard Grieg, actors such as
Ellen Terry, sportsmen such as the Channel swimmer
Matthew Webb, and members of the Royal Family from
the Queen down. The photographers who actually took
the pictures were relatively few in number, but one of
them was Clarence Fry himself, who was still working
as a photographer until shortly before his death. The
most frequently employed during the nineteenth century
was Francis Henry Hart of Fitzroy Square and St John’s
Wood but others were the Chevalier Luigi Beroieri of
Chelsea until his return to Italy in 1896; John McLa-
nachan of Hanwell and later Torquay; and Alfred James
Philpott of Richmond and Twickenham.
The photographic style of the company throughout
the period was simple, with few props (some of which
remained in use for many years), and fewer backdrops
despite their apparent prominence in the studios. By the
end of the century lighting was effectively used to give
defi nition and life to features and to provide impressive
depth and detail in costumes and hair. Poses were almost
always formal, even with actors in costume, but someindividuals, such as J. M. Barrie and the poet Longfellow
managed to appear more relaxed.
The company survived until 1963 when it was taken
over by Bassano & Vandyck (now the Bassano Portrait
Studios). Its surviving negatives and prints were de-
posited in the National Portrait Gallery, only a small
proportion of which date from the nineteenth century.
There are however many prints of nineteenth century
portraits by the company at The National Archives.
Tim Padfield
See also: Calotype and Talbotype; Talbot, William
Henry Fox; Pritchard, Henry Baden; Cartes-de-Visite;
and Woodburytype, Woodburygravure.Further Reading
H. Baden Pritchard, The Photographic Studios of Europe, Lon-
don: Piper and Carter, 1882. (reprinted 1973)
Bevis Hillier ed, Victorian studio photographs from the collec-
tions of Studio Bassano and Elliott & Fry, London: Ash &
Grant, 1976.
‘Messrs Elliott and Fry at Baker Street,’ The Photographic News,
30 January 1880, 50–51.
Terence Pepper ed, High Society Photographs, London: National
Portrait Gallery, 1998.ELLIS, ALEXANDER JOHN (1814–1890)
Alexander John Ellis took some of the earliest da-
guerreotypes in Italy, but his photographic achievements
have been overshadowed by his many other accomplish-
ments: his major interests were in the areas of spelling,
pronunciation, mathematics and musical acoustics. The
daguerreotypes were never published and he did not de-
velop his fl irtation with photography. His intention was
to produce accurate representations of familiar Italian
views but he was perhaps as fascinated by the technical
aspects as by any aesthetic considerations, as also seems
to have been the case with his musical interests.
At the age of 26, while travelling on the continent,
Ellis decided to undertake an ambitious publishing proj-
ect entitled Italy Daguerreotyped, for which he took a
large quantity of landscapes and architectural views in
a number of Italian cities. His choice of subjects traded
on associations with the Grand Tour and the Enlighten-
ment concern with classical civilisation. Public interest
had been stimulated by the opening of the continent to
leisure travel after the Napoleonic wars, and the focus
of the Ellis collection is on topographical views in the
tradition of vedute, a repertoire of locations well-known
from previous illustrations.
Pictures at this time were often imaginative interpre-
tations. Painters such as Claude Lorrain (1600–1682)
had established, and those such as Louis Ducros
(1748–1810) had perpetuated, a style that exploited
historical and literary associations of established sites,ELLIOTT, JOSEPH JOHN & FRY, CLARENCE EDMUND
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