Feb 19, 2009 - Sale 2170

Sale 2170 - Lot 6

Price Realized: $ 132,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
BEDFORD, FRANCIS (1816-1894)
Suite of 3 albums entitled "Photographic Pictures Made By Mr. Francis Bedford During the Tour in the East in which, by command, he accompanied His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales." With a total of 172 photographs. Albumen prints, each is approximately 8 3/4x11 inches (22.2x27.9 cm.), many with Bedford's credit in the negative, and each with a handwritten caption on mount recto; with a single photograph mounted to each leaf. Oblong folio, rebound in contemporary cloth with the original gilt-lettered morocco title label "Photographic Pictures of Tours in the East" affixed to front covers. London: Day & Son, 1862
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Additional Details

from the collection of hon. robert w. turner, consul general to spain from 1889-1893; gifted to a midwestern public institution.


Vol. I, Egypt (73 photographs)

Vol. II, Holy Land and Syria (52 photographs)

Vol. III, Constantinople and the Mediterranean (47 photographs).


Francis Bedford was one of Britain''s most important 19th-century photographers. His accomplished expedition photographs are complemented by his architectural and landscape studies. Early on, Bedford was recognized for his technical and aesthetic aptitude with a camera. As a result, his pictures were brought to the attention of Queen Victoria, who invited him to be official photographer to her son, the Prince of Wales, on an educational tour of the Middle East in 1862.


Bedford produced more than 200 large-format glass plate negatives of sites in Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Turkey. Upon his return to England, 172 photographs were selected, printed and assembled into three albums. The works were exhibited throughout Great Britain and universally championed as masterful photographic studies. The Art Journal referred to Bedford''s pictures as "The most interesting series of photographs that has ever been brought before the public . . . nothing can be more beautiful than the precision of these views. (Richard Pare: Photography and Architecture, 1839-1939, 247-248.)


Although examples of Bedford''s albumen photographs from 1870 onward are more common, photographs from this early period of 1854-1870 are considered scarce. Indeed, very few albums and individual views of his Middle East expedition have been offered and few are as well-preserved as those in this lot.