| Names: | | | Dates: | 1830 - 1858, 2 December | | Born: | Great Britain | | Active: | UK |
Best known for his portrait of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He took a series of the engineering feats of Brunel including the construction of the steamship Leviathan (Great Eastern).
Stereographs project
Business locations
London, England, UK
[In partnership with George Downes] Pub. jointly from Downes' "Photographic Institution" at 168 New Bond St., London. Rare but interesting area views; Brunel; construction of LEVIATHAN 57; etc. B. 31, D. 58.
T.K. Treadwell & William C. Darrah (Compiled by), Wolfgang, Sell (Updated by), 11/28/2003, Photographers of the World (Non-USA), (National Stereoscopic Association) |
| Credit: National Stereoscopic Association with corrections and additions by Alan Griffiths and others. |
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Preparing biographies
Robert Howlett produced portraits of Crimean War heroes, genre scenes and landscapes. His major work however, was to document the construction of the massive steamship the Great Eastern. His images were translated into engravings for The Illustrated Times. They reflected and stimulated the widespread interest in this feat of engineering. Howlett also produced the well known portrait of the Great Eastern’s creator and engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, standing in front of the ship's chains. This is perhaps one of the first examples of environmental portraiture.
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 11 Nov 2011.
SHARED BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION PROJECT
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Born in London, Howlett came of age just as photography was beginning to, and it would be his only career. Little is known of how he began, but Howlett traced his first photographic work back to 1852. Within three years he was in partnership with joseph cundall and philip henry delamotte at the Photographic Institution on New Bond Street. Howlett contributed three calotypes to the 1856 exhibition of the Manchester Photographic Society and became involved with the Photographic Society in London, rapidly developing a reputation as a solid experimentalist. As T. Frederick Hardwich observed, “Rarely did I leave him without feeling that I had carried away something which I could set down in my note-book as a genuine experimental fact.” Howlett was a versatile photographer, doing portraits, landscapes, and even the character studies that William Powell Frith would use as a basis for his celebrated painting The Derby Day. Among his contemporaries, Howlett was most admired for his large reproductions of artworks, but today he is best remembered for his iconic portrait of the great British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Howlett exhibited prolifically, nearly always offering his work for sale, but in 1858, less than three weeks after an enthusiastic report to the Photographic Society, he succumbed to typhus. Howlett’s shocked colleagues blamed his premature death on the fact that, trying to do the work of three men, he had caught a severe cold while working in his new and damp darkroom.
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.
SHARED BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION PROJECT
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If you find any errors please email us details so they can be corrected as soon as possible. |
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| Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. | | Go to website | Grove Art Online (www.groveart.com) has a biography of this artist.
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