| Dates: | 1814, 11 April - 1891, 19 July | | Died: | England, London | | Active: | India |
Neill served in the Indian Medical Service in Madras 1838-1858. As an enthusiastic amateur photographer and member of the Photographic Society of Bengal, he photographed the temple architecture of Belur and Halebid. In 1885 his photographs were exhibited at the Madras Industrial Exhibition of Raw Products, Arts and Manufacture of South India to much acclaim. He was a friend of Richard Banner Oakley, who worked in Halebid in 1856. Neill photographed the Indian Mutiny in 1857. His architectural photographs appear with those of Thomas Biggs and William Harry Pigou in ‘Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore‘ (1866) by James Fergusson and Philip Meadows.Preparing biographies
Neill, born in Scotland and a doctor attached to the Indian Medical Service in Madras, was a good friend of Richard Banner Oakeley. In the 1855 exhibition of the Photographic Society of Madras he exhibited calotypes, which one reviewer felt could be compared to the work of Linnaeus Tripe. During the 1856-57 mutiny at Lucknow, Neill took portraits and photographed the scenes of destruction. At a meeting of the Photographic Society of Bengal in 1857 he showed twenty architectural views in the waxed-paper process. Neill’s photographs were used to illustrate the 1866 Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore and the 1869 Illustrations of Various Styles of Indian Architecture.
Roger Taylor & Larry J. Schaaf Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 4 Nov 2012.
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John Falconer, British Library
A Biographical Dictionary of 19th Century Photographers in South and South-East Asia |
Amateur, India
MD, Glasgow, 1837; Indian Medical Service (Madras), 1838-58.
Photographed scenes and portraits at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny 1857-8. His photographs also appear in M. Taylor and J. Fergusson, Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore (1866) and J. Fergusson, Illustrations of various styles of Indian Architecture (1869). He was also a friend of Richard Banner Oakeley (qv), who photographed at Halebid in late 1856.
At the 1855 Madras Exhibition,
Dr Neill of the 1st Regiment Light Cavalry also [along with Linnaeus Tripe] exhibits a good series of view of the same temples [Halebid and Belur] nearly equal in merit to the former, but not so numerous; amongst them may be mentioned the interior of the Court of the pagoda at Bellore No. 5, principal pagoda near Hullabede, No. 7 ruined pagoda near Hullabede, in this the sky is a little too dark and the clouds rather harsh and artificial. The view of the celebrated hill of Mavana Bellagole with the gigantic statue on the top 60 feet high is very characteristic. Dr Neill also exhibits good views of St Andrew’s Church, and the Light house at Madras, with a few characteristic landscapes, the best of which are a cocoanut and betel garden with jungle. A dead tree in a landscape, bund of a tank and a large banian tree. The Jury recommend a 2nd Class Medal for this collection’.[1]
Exhibited 20 waxed paper negatives (prints from?) of architectural views of Mysore and Bellary, at Photographic Society of Bengal meeting of March 1857.
[IOR/L/MIL/9/385 ff. 59-64.]
Footnotes
- Λ Madras Exhibition of raw products, arts, and manufactures of Southern India, 1855. Reports by the Juries, Athenaeum Press, Madras, p. 134.
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