z.1. Archibald Henry Plantagenet STUART WORTLEY, geb. 26/07/1832, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland, oorl. 30/04/1890, London, Engeland x 29/06/1865 met Augusta VERSCHOYLE, youngest dau of Robert Verschoyle, Esq.
Archibald Henry Plantagenet was die seun van Charles James Stuart Wortley en Emmeline Charlotte Elizabeth Henry.
At St. Peter's , Pimlico, Archibald Henry Plantagenet Stuart Wortley , eldest and only surviving son of the late Hon Charles and Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley , to Augusta, youngest dau. of Robert Verschoyle, esq .
Wortley was a respected contemporary of such camera artists as Gustave Le Gray and Julia Margaret Cameron. He was considered one of the most daring and accomplished photographers of his era. In 1898, nine years after Wortley died at age 58, London’s Royal Photographic Society honored him with a retrospective exhibition. His work has not been on public view since.
It’s hard to understand why when facing the emotionally charged pictures that make up this revival. Fashion? And why, at last, now? Part of the answer to that certainly lies in the fact that history has conspired to plant the world’s finest examples of Wortley’s work in, of all places, Southern California. Everything on view comes from the combined collections of two museums created here by major Anglophiles, Henry and Arabella Huntington and J. Paul Getty.
The artist’s aristocratic lineage reflects both in the fact that as a boy he served as page of honor to Queen Victoria and as an adult had to lug around the unwieldy handle, Lt.-Col. Archibald Henry Plantagenet Stuart Wortley. Retired from the military at 30, he--like a surprising number of the most adventurous early photographers--answered the expensive and unwieldy calling of gentleman amateur of the camera. Today he’d probably do multimedia computer art.
He founded two substantial photographic businesses to supplement his income and contributed journal articles that reflected J.M.W. Turner’s influence on his art and John Ruskin’s impact on his thinking.
None of his pictures looks anything like the entrepreneurial image created by knowing his activities. They are, mainly, seascapes dominated by cloudy skies of varying mood and provocative shape that invite the dreamers’ game of imagining fantastic beings in the floating fog.
The works look like, and pose as, studies at sunset or by moonlight. They are, in fact, neither.
Early camera equipment was so stiff and lenses so demanding that most photographers had a terrible time with Wortley’s subject matter. Clouds disappeared at one exposure. Water flattened out at another. Most practitioners solved the problem by doing darkroom tricks, combining skies from one shot with water from another. Not Wortley.
He waited until the sun went behind a cloud bank then clicked the lens so quickly that the negative was seriously underexposed and dark. This gained him two advantages. The fast exposure stopped motion so he could capture images of crashing waves. In one untitled picture they seem about to demolish a little seaside town. This got him the critics’ accolade of “instantaneous” photographer.
At the same time his low-light source suppressed detail, generalizing forms. This got him the even higher critical accolade of “breadth of effect.”
The larger results were images that were neither really just tricky, nor precisely faithful renderings of what he saw. They have that uncanny quality of things that are at once observed and imagined. Wortley had turned photography into art.
He clearly understood this. Later works grow ever more concerned with mood and imagination. Their titles become lines of poetry such as Thomas Moore’s “The world is a crystal ball. How calm, how beautiful comes on/The stilly hours when storms are gone.”
In these works thin bands of landscape take on the role of calm rationality, while the skies become the brooding, capricious creatures of emotion, now black as anger, now as wise and elegiac as a peaceful death. One sky shows clouds scudding apart like shiny pearls vaporizing. It feels like an instant of solemn ecstasy.
The pictures are very special. They come together here as the result of historical serendipity and create another one. If they look like anything else, they look like the pastel sky scapes of the L.A. master Peter Alexander, another romantic heir to Turner. (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-05-14-ca-57578-story.html)
