Alice Hughes

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alice Mary Hughes (born August 3, 1857 in Notting Hill , ( Kensington ), London , † April 4, 1939 in Worthing , West Sussex ) was a British society photographer .

Life

Alice Hughes' photo of Louise, Duchess of Fife, with their two daughters

Alice Hughes was the youngest of three children of the portrait painter Edward Hughes (1832-1908) and his first wife Mary Ann Sherratt. When Alice was seven years old, her mother died. Two years later, her father married Kate Margetts for the second time. When she died, too, the father ordered Alice as his only surviving child - the two older siblings had also died in the meantime - from their boarding school in Brussels to take care of the household for him and do the paperwork for his business.

Alice later studied photography at the Polytechnic School of Photography ; initially only to be able to photographically document her father's exclusive portrait paintings. In 1891, however, she opened her own photo studio on Gower Street in Bloomsbury . As the first gentlewoman professional photographer , she photographed numerous members of the British royal family, for example Queen Alexandra or her daughter Louise with her two children Maud and Alexandra . Hughes later also portrayed Queen Mary . At the height of her fame in the mid-1890s, she was London's leading society photographer and employed sixty women. By the turn of the century, she had a near monopoly on the cover image of Country Life magazine .

In December 1910, she sold her business, including an inventory of 50,000 negatives, to her competitor Speaight & Son Ltd. and went to Berlin in 1914 to open a new studio. Surprised by the outbreak of the First World War , she returned to London and opened another studio on Ebury Street in Westminster in 1915 , which she ran until her retirement in 1933.

Hughes worked with Platinotype and photographed the meticulous toilet, with large hats and evening gown, in the style of the portrait painters Reynolds and Gainsborough . She specialized in the dignified posturing of women and mother-and-child groups; She rarely portrayed men.

literature

  • Juliet Hacking: Hughes, Alice Mary (1857-1939) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Online edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, doi : 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 65306 .
  • Liz Heron, Val Williams (Ed.): Illuminations. Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present . Tauris, London [u. a.] 1996, ISBN 978-1-86064-041-4 , pp. 3-7 ( online ).
  • Andrea Inselmann (Ed.): A second look. Women photographers of the Gernsheim Collection . Exhibition catalog, Fotomuseum Frankfurt am Main 1993.
  • Jo Stanley: Women's Art Magazine . London, July / August 1994.

Web links

Commons : Alice Hughes  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Juliet Hacking: Hughes, Alice Mary (1857–1939) , 2004, o. P.
  2. ↑ Information on Alice Hughes and her first photo studio from the Bloomsbury Project at University College London , accessed January 28, 2014.
  3. ↑ a b Information and references on Alice Hughes at photolondon.org.uk , accessed on January 28, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Hughes, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hughes, Alice Mary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British photographer
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 1939
Place of death Worthing , West Sussex