Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
Sutcliffe was a leading naturalistic photographer in Victorian England. Working during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, he operated a portrait studio in the northern coastal city of Whitby, but was most revered for his sensitive images of its port and everyday people.
 
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe was born in Headingley, on October 6, 1853, to a father who was supportive of artistic endeavors, being a photographer and artist himself. The family moved to Whitby in 1871, and over the next few years Sutcliffe photographed abbeys and castles throughout Yorkshire for the country’s leading commercial firm, Francis Frith and Company.
 
For a short time in 1875, Sutcliffe ran his own portrait studio in Tunbridge Wells, but returned to Whitby the next year, after it failed. There, he established a successful one, which he operated for over forty-five years. Realizing his portrait business was seasonal, Sutcliffe began exploring the city’s streets, docks, and other public areas, capturing children, fishermen, and merchants, going about their daily routines. Never directing his subjects, he excelled at finding people posing naturally in realistic settings. He printed most of these photographs in carbon, a rich and permanent process that only enhanced the creative look of his images.
 
Sutcliffe was elected to membership in London’s Linked Ring Brotherhood in 1892, giving him entry to the country’s most exclusive group of artistic photographers. His work was reproduced in Photograms of the Year between 1897 and 1900 and in 1903. Most importantly, an issue of Sun Artists was devoted to him in July 1891, part of an important series of monographs edited by W. Arthur Boord and published in London. This lavish periodical featured four signed photogravures of his work, including Water Rats, his best-known piece, picturing young, nude boys who had arranged themselves nicely in shallow water.
 
Sutcliffe exhibited in salons and other photographic exhibitions in Europe and the United States for thirty years. He began by 1873, when his work was included in the annual showing of the Photographic Society of Great Britain (later the Royal Photographic Society). Among the places presenting his photographs were Berlin, Brussels, Edinburgh, Florence, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Paris, Vienna, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Rochester. His pictures appeared in the 1896 showing of the George Timmins collection in Syracuse, New York, and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
 
From 1903 to about 1930, Sutcliffe was a prolific writer for both the photographic press and the Yorkshire Evening Post. He retired from his portrait studio around 1922. The next year, at age seventy, he became the curator of the Whitby museum, a post he held for most of the rest of his life
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Wikipedia
 
Francis Meadow (Frank) Sutcliffe (6 October 1853 - 31 May 1941) was an English pioneering photographic artist whose work presented an enduring record of life in the seaside town of Whitby, England, and surrounding areas, in the late Victorian era and early 20th century. His documentation of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in Whitby, led him to be labelled as the "pictorial Boswell of Whitby.