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The photographer Edmund
Wheeler junior (1836-1930) produced carte-de-visite
portraits at his studio at 43 Western Road, Brighton, between
1870 and 1906. Cartes-de-visite were small photographic paper prints
on card mounts the same
size as conventional visiting cards (roughly 21/2
inches by 41/4
inches or 6.3 cm
by 10.5 cm). This photographic format
originated in France and so a small portrait mounted on card
came to be known as a 'carte-de-visite',
the
French term for visiting
card, although, in England, these small photographic portraits were occasionally referred to as "album
portraits".
Edmund
Wheeler introduced a novel method of identifying the year a
particular photograph was taken by adding a suffix to the
negative number, which was customarily written in ink on the
reverse of carte-de-visite portraits. Each letter of the
alphabet represented a particular year of business. The
letter "A"
matched the year 1873, the letter "B" corresponded to
the year 1874, and so on, until the letter "Z" was
reached. After utilizing nearly all of the letters of the
alphabet ("I" and "O" were excluded
for obvious reasons), Wheeler would start again, but this time
with a double letter "AA", "BB" , "CC"
and so on.
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[ABOVE] A carte-de-visite portrait of a young woman leaning on a
padded chair, a photographic portrait taken by Edmund Wheeler of 43 Western
Road, Brighton around 1873. Negative No. 720A |
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A Carte-de-visite
portrait produced by Edmund Wheeler of Brighton (inscribed with
the date of the sitting and the name & date of birth of the sitter,
Cyril Herbert Brass) |
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[ABOVE] Cyril Herbert Brass (aged 5), a carte-de-visite
portrait produced by Edmund Wheeler of 43 Western
Road, Brighton in May 1877. Cyril Herbert Brass, who
was born on 7th January 1872, was the son of Alice Edith Shaw
and Reverend John Brass (1839-1912), who had been the Curate of
St Saviour's Church, Eastbourne. Photographed when he was 5 years of
age, Cyril Herbert Brass was later to serve as an
officer in Her Majesty's Militia. In 1895, Cyril Herbert
Brass married Constance
Marguerite Eglinton Whish.
This union produced a son named Philip Hugh Gordon Brass (born
1896, Cuckfield, Sussex). At the time the 1901 census, twenty-nine
year old Cyril Brass was residing in Kimpton,
Hertfordshire and is described on the census return as a "Managing
Director and Manager of a Brewery". Cyril Brass and his wife
Constance divorced in 1908. Three years after his divorce, Cyril
Brass and his 14 year old son were lodging at a boarding
house near Bath, Somerset. On the 1911 census return, Cyril Herbert
Brass describes himself as a "Brewer" and his marital status as
"Single". Cyril Herbert Brass died at Soham,
Cambridgeshire, on 13th September 1914, at the age of 42. (A pencilled
inscription on the back of the Wheeler carte-de-visite wrongly
states that Cyril Brass died in 1915 - his death was recorded in 1914). |
[ABOVE] The inscription on the reverse of the carte-de-visite portrait
illustrated on the left. The caption, hand-written in black ink,
reads: "Cyril Herbert Brass, May 1877 (b: 7th January 1872)".
Normally, it is possible to estimate the date of a carte-de-visite
produced at Edmund Wheeler's Brighton studio on the basis of the
photographic negative number and the letter of the alphabet which had
been added as a suffix. [ See the Edmund Wheeler Negative Code chart
below and the selection of carte-de-visite portraits produced by
Edmund Wheeler at his Brighton studio between 1870 and 1906
illustrated in the Portrait Gallery, below). This particular carte-de-visite
portrait of Cyril Herbert Brass does not carry a
negative reference number. Although the carte-de-visite has been
cropped to allow it to be slipped into a Victorian photograph album,
it seems clear that the back of cdv did not have the usual printed
area for the negative number ("No.
................").
I think it is likely that the Brighton photographer Edmund Wheeler
was asked to make several copies of the original carte-de-visite
portrait which had been taken at Wheeler's studio at 43 Western Road,
Brighton, in 1877. The fringed, posing-chair in the portrait of Cyril
Brass also appears in a cabinet portrait by Edmund Wheeler which dates
from the 1880s. |
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