814
magazine or paper which contains portraits of present-
day celebrities without seeing at least one reproduction
of a photograph by the well-known Lafayette house
[with its] ‘special Lafayette silver process’.” By 1897,
the fame of his portraits of the great society beauties,
such as the Countess of Warwick, Daisy Princess of
Pless, and Queen Alexandra, led the critic Levin Carnac
(pseudonym of the author George Chetwynd Griffi th-
Jones) to muse in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897 that it
was “Lafayette’s blissful lot to photograph more of the
most beautiful and distinguished women of Europe than
anyone else.” The male was not forgotten and portraits
of distinguished men and from society, the stage, and
politics appeared prominently in the various new publi-
cations, frequently providing the frontispiece and setting
the tone for the publication.
The sale of photographic postcards had also become
big business, and certain images by Lafayette, such
as Queen Alexandra in her Doctor of Music robes,
registered for copyright on 28 April 1885, sold over
eighty thousand copies by 1900. The Lafayette range
of postcards included many images of the British royal
family as well as luminaries of the stage, including a
seminal series of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet from her
London season of 1899.
On 2 July 1897, to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond
Jubilee, Louisa, Duchess of Devonshire (1832–1911),
one of London’s foremost political hostesses, held a
costume ball with around seven hundred guests ranging
from royalty down to aristocracy and a commission went
out to Lafayette, who had opened a studio on London’s
fashionable Bond Street with “patent fog-clearing equip-
ment” earlier that year, to set up a tent in the garden to
photograph the guests in costume during the Ball. This
would have been a formidable commission for James
Stack Lauder, and evidence from the extant negatives
shows that he had transported from the Bond Street studio
a variety of backdrops and props and, of course, photo-
graphic equipment. His remit was to photograph guests
who would be in costumes ranging from mythological
and ancient Greek down to renaissance and oriental char-
acters. In order to capture the sense of event and location,
the studio prepared a new backdrop representing the very
lawn and gardens of Devonshire House complete with
statuary. Approximately 162 negatives exist from this
event, many of which were published by the Duchess
of Devonshire in a private album and which represent
the studio’s largest output from a single photographic
session. A copy of this album is held by the National
Portrait Gallery, London.
The Lafayette studio, which survived the vicissitudes
of World War I and Irish Independence, fi nally closed in
1952—the Lauder family having been in the business con-
tinuously from 1853. A storeroom of negatives, possibly
representing the press archive of the studio, was discovered
in the attic of a building in Fleet Street in 1968 during
building works. The archive was eventually handed to the
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, which kept 3,500
glass plate and celluloid negatives dating from 1885 to
c 1937. The rest of the collection, consisting of circa forty
thousand nitrate negatives from the 1920s to the early
1950s, was given to the National Portrait Gallery.
During the heyday of the Lafayette studio, the ranks
of sitters included most of the British royal family, many
European royalties, a signifi cant number of maharajas,
and offi cial visitors from the Far East. The quality of the
studio’s portraiture peaked between 1897 and 1920 and
was an inspiration to the following generation of pho-
tographers, who were more willing to experiment with
new styles of lighting and posing. Of the thousands of
images credited to Lafayette and which are recognisably
portraits in the Lafayette style, only 649 photographs
registered for copyright before 1912 bear the signature
of James Lauder as author.
James Stack Lauder died at the Hôpital St. Jean,
Bruges on 20 August 1923.
Russell HarrisFurther Reading
Beaton, Cecil, British Photographers, London, William Collins,
1944.
——, My Bolivian Aunt: A Memoir, London, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1971.
——, My Royal Past by Baroness von Bülop née Princess
Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-
Waldstein, London, Batsford, 1939.
British Journal of Photography, 6 December 1895.
Brown, Julie K., Contesting Images: Photography and the World’s
Columbian Exposition, Tucson and London, University of
Arizona Press, 1994.
Copyright Records, Public Record Offi ce, Kew, COPY 1/413.
Devee, Sunity, Maharani of Cooch Behar, The Autobiography of
an Indian Princess, John Murray, London, 1921.
Devonshire House Fancy Dress Ball, July 2 1897: A Collection
of Portraits in Costume of Some of the Guests, privately
printed, 1899.
Dimond, Frances, Developing the Picture: Queen Alexandra and
the Art of Photography, London, Royal Collection Publica-
tions, 2004.
Harris, Russell, “The Devonshire House Ball as Photographed by
Monsieur Lafayette,” in the European Royal History Journal,
XLIV, May 2005.
——, “The Great Commercial Photographic Studios of London”
in The European Royal History Journal, XXXVII, February
2004
——, “The Lafayette Project,” in Durbar, Journal of the Indian
Military Collectors Society, volume 9, no. 1.
——, Maharajas at the Lafayette Studio, New Delhi, Roli
Books, 2005.
——, Maharajas at the London Studios, New Delhi, Roli Books,
2001.
——, “Portretele unei Regine: Regina Maria în imagini inedite”
in Magazin Istoric, XXXVIII, New Series, no. 11(452), Bu-
charest, November 2004.
——, “Royal Images held in the Lafayette Archive at the Victoria