The Signet Library was privileged to share with the National Portrait Gallery the hosting of the Royal Photographic Society’s Historical Group on its Edinburgh visit this month. A special exhibition was put together for the Group, who also enjoyed a tour of the building.
Although the Signet Library has never collected photography for its own sake, much important work was acquired under other headings, and material purchased to be part of an important topographical collection has with the passage of time gained an interest of its own. The Library is especially rich in the work of the great Glaswegians Thomas Annan and his son James Craig Annan, with some unique examples of Thomas Annan’s work recently placed on loan with us through the kindness of member Calum Ross.
Also on show were glass negatives from Penicuik House, whose donation was brokered by conservator Jo Hockey, who also built the light box for their display. Amongst these is the only known view of Penicuik House before its destruction by fire in 1899.
The Signet Library was one of the first Edinburgh interiors to be photographed for its own sake, and a range of early examples by George Washington Wilson was on view. The law was represented by examples of trial evidence photography from the collection bequeathed by the great WS crime writer William Roughead with the WS was represented by an album of rare early Francis Frith images of Europe and the Middle East once owned by Alexander Mitchell WS (1833-1902) and some unique landscape works by Elmslie William Dallas, the son-in-law of a WS.
We are grateful to Dr. Ella Ravilious of the Victoria and Albert Museum for her permission to show her short film of the 1871 Dossetter photographic copy of the Bayeux Tapestry. Over two hundred feet long and displayed on a pair of rotating wooden stands, Dossetter’s hand-coloured photograph of the tapestry remains one of the largest panoramic images ever taken. Our former copy, acquired at the end of the Second World War, later passed through the ownership of Rolling Stone Charlie Watts before its recent acquisition by the Bayeux Tapestry Museum. It be a key exhibit at the new museum premises now under construction.