44
School of Art, wears her wide collar heavily embroi-
dered with roses and hearts. Jessie M King, the book
illustrator, gazes out from under a huge bonnet. The
image of the architect and designer C. R. Mackintosh
known today is the one Annan created of him in tweed
suit, fl owing bow tie, minute kiss-curl on forehead.
Annan’s rotund G. K. Chesterton carries faint echoes of
Hill and Adamson’s “Professor Alexander Monro.”
Annan could recall as a child meeting D.O. Hill and
he knew well two volumes of calotypes which Hill’s
widow had presented to his father, a close friend. About
1890 he made a set of twenty photogravures from their
original calotypes. He lent prints to Hamburg in 1899, to
Stieglitz’s ‘291’ Gallery in New York in 1906, where Hill
was presented as the Father of Pictorial Photography, to
the Salon in London in 1909, and to Buffalo in 1910. He
also supplied Stieglitz with photogravure prints of their
work to appear in Camera Work in 1905, 1909 and 1912.
At the very end of Annan’s life Helmut Gernsheim, ad-
dressing him as “a great master of photography,” asked
for information about Hill. Annan corrected the account
of Hill in Gernsheim’s New Photo Vision, Fountain
1942, by mentioning Brewster and Adamson. However,
Gernsheim gave Annan his due, “Hill was only thought
of again when photography was rediscovered as an art
by Craig Annan and his circle.”
Principal collections of Annan’s work: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; Museum für Kunst und
Gewerbe, Hamburg; Royal Photographic Society;
Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin.
William Buchanan
Biography
James Craig Annan, the second son of Thomas Annan
and Mary Young Craig, was born on 8 March 1864 at
Talbot Cottage, 15 Burnbank Road, Hamilton. He left
school in 1877 when the family moved to Lenzie to set
up a carbon printing works. About 1878 he attended
chemistry lectures at Anderson’s college. In 1883 he
learnt photogravure from Karl Klíč in Vienna. On his
father’s death in 1887 he became a partner in the fi rm.
About 1890 he made photogravure prints from Hill and
Adamson calotypes. He lent these to exhibitions in Eu-
rope and the United States. He championed their work.
Also about this time he decided to become a creative
photographer. In 1894 he was elected a member of the
Linked Ring. He exhibited, often by invitation, in New
York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Brussels, Antwerp, Munich,
Berlin, Philadelphia, Hamburg, Turin, the Hague and
other places. His work was also widely reproduced in
the many photographic magazines of the time. He re-
mained a bachelor. He died on 6 July 1946 at his home,
Glenbank, Lenzie.
See also: Gernsheim, Alison and Helmut Erich
Robert; Hill, David Octavius, and Robert Adamson;
Stieglitz, Alfred; Photo-Club de Paris; Brotherhood of
the Linked Ring; and Annan, Thomas.Further Reading
Andries, Pool et al., La Photographie d’Art vers 1900 [Art
Photography around 1900], Brussels: Credit Communal de
Belgique, 1983 (exhibition catalogue).
Buchanan, William, “James Craig Annan: Brave Days in
Glasgow” in British Photography in the Nineteenth Century:
The Fine Art Tradition edited by Mike Weaver, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Buchanan, William, The Art of the Photographer J. Craig An-
nan 1864–1946, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland,
1992.
Buchanan, William, J. Craig Annan: Selected Texts and Bibliog-
raphy, Oxford: Clio Press, 1994.
Harker, Margaret, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement
in Photography in Britain, 1892–1910, London: Heineman,
1979.
Naef, Weston J., The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers
of Modern Photography, New York: Viking, 1978.ANNAN, THOMAS (1830–1887)
Scottish photographer and founder of a
photographic fi rm
Thomas Annan, who lived when the commercial aspects
of photography were being explored, established his
fi rm, T. & R. Annan, in Glasgow. His obituary in The
British Journal of Photography noted his high reputa-
tion for the reproduction of works of art, as photography
replaced techniques like engraving, but it made no men-
tion of Annan’s qualities as a photographer. He created
some of the memorable images of his century.
In 1862 the Glasgow Art Union, to replace the usual
engravings issued to its subscribers, asked Annan to
produce photographic prints. These proved acceptable.
Annan did not merely photograph a painting. He gave
a print of it to the artist to work upon. This was then
photographed and from that negative the prints were
made. The reproductions of Noël Paton’s “The Fairy
Raid” were made this way.
Annan kept in the forefront of the new permanent
processes. The rights to Joseph Swan’s carbon process
were bought by Braun for France and Belgium, by
Hanfstaengl for Germany, by Annan in 1866 for Scot-
land and by the Autotype Company, two years later, for
England. Swan’s fi rst major production was to make
in 1866 from Annan’s negative, carbon prints, in three
sizes, each in an edition of 1,000, of D. O. Hill’s painting
“Signing the Deed of Demission.” Hill had originally
advertised (23 years before) that the reproductions
would be engravings. These carbon prints were hung in
many a pious Scottish household. When Annan heard