Robert Alexander Hillingford was an English painter. He specialized in historical pictures battle scenes, he was born in London on 28 January 1828, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf for five years beginning in 1841. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, he traveled to Munich, Rome and Naples, where he married and worked for several years, producing paintings of Italian life. One painting from this period entitled The Last Evening of the Carnival was exhibited at St. Petersburg in 1859, he returned to London in 1864, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1866. He was a regular exhibitor at other galleries. While he was attracted to costume pieces such as An incident in the early life of Louis XIV and During the wanderings of Charles Edward Stuart, he painted some contemporary military scenes, including his 1901 RA painting South Africa, 1901 - The Dawn of Peace; the original paintings come up at auction, with a large amount of the collection dispersed in 1998, they are scattered.
The Duchess of Richmond's Ball Yet Still a King Hurry up the Guns: Wellington driving the French out of Spain and into France The Escape of Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain with British troopers charging Surrender: The capture of General Lefebre Desnouettes at the Ford of the Elsa at Benavente, 1809, by Pte. Luke Guisdall, 10th Hussars The Duke of Marlborough saving the day at Ramillies Ramillies, 23 May 1706: capture of the standards and kettledrums by the Queen's Regiment of Horse The Defence of Hougoumont After Waterloo: The English Army halting upon what had been the French position... Napoleon's peril at Brienne-le-Chateau The Morning of Waterloo Summoned to Waterloo: Brussels, dawn of June 16, 1815 Battle of Balaclava, Charge of the Light Brigade Sebastopol: the attack on the Redan Death of Sir Richard Granville, captain of the Revenge, on board the Spanish Flagship San Pablo after the Battle of Flores Charge of the Light Brigade The Scots Greys among the French Guns at Waterloo A critical moment at Quatre Bras The flight of the French through the town of Vittoria: Peninsular War South Africa, 1901: The Dawn of Peace.
George II at Dettingen Champlin, John Deniso. "Hillingford, Robert Alexander". Cyclopedia of painters and paintings. 2. New York: C. Scribner's sons. Pp. 260, 261. Baird, Rosemary. Goodwood: Art and Architecture and Family. Frances lincoln. P. 157. ISBN 0-7112-2769-1. Robert Hillingford at military-prints.com Harrington, Peter.. British Artists and War: The Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700-1914. London: Greenhill. ISBN 1-85367-157-6 Roe, F. Gordon, "The Hillingford Sage", Vol. 190, No. 763, September 1975, pp. 50–55
Edmund Robert Harris was a British lawyer from Preston, Lancashire, the principal benefactor of the Harris Museum, Harris Institute or Art School, Harris Technical School and the Harris Orphanage. Harris was the son of the Reverend Robert Harris vicar of St George's Parish Church in Preston and headmaster of the Preston Grammar School; the Reverend Harris was the librarian of the Dr. Richard Shepherd Library and had been involved in a long campaign for the creation of a free public library and museum in Preston. Harris died aged 73 at his home at Whinfield House in Ashton on 27 May 1877 and was buried in a triple coffin in a vault in St Andrews Church, Ashton. After the death of his father in 1862 and his brother Thomas in 1875, Edmund Harris inherited the family's entire wealth and had no heirs, he left instructions in his will and £300,000 to create a trust that would help support several new institutions in Preston, including a free public library and art gallery. They were all dedicated in memory of his family and in particular his father the Reverend Robert Harris.
The Harris Museum is the only institution created by the Harris bequest that still exists in its original form. The Harris Institute and Harris Technical School became the University of Central Lancashire and the university still has the Harris technical school building on Corporation Street as part of its campus; the Harris Institute building on Avenham Lane and Harris Orphanage buildings on Garstang Road are now in private ownership. The Harris Free Public Library and Museum Endowment Trust still exists to support the work of the Harris Museum and the library. Harris Museum & Art Gallery Harris Library University of Central Lancashire
James Ambrose Cutting was an American photographer and inventor, sometimes called the inventor of the Ambrotype photographic process. He grew up in poverty on a farm in New Hampshire. At age 28, he invented a new type of beehive in 1842, on the money from selling his patents moved to Boston, Massachusetts. To create an ambrotype, the photographer sensitized a polished plate of glass by the wet plate collodion process and exposed the plate in a camera to produce a negative image; the wet plate collodion process was invented just a few years before by Frederick Scott Archer and used for glass negatives, but in an ambrotype the collodion image is used as a positive, instead of a negative. When dry, the glass plate was backed either with black paint, cloth, or paper; some ambrotypes were made with ruby or dark green glass to simulate the effect of a backing without using one. Ambrotypes were hand-colored, most with dabs of red paint on the cheeks of the sitter, they were housed in wood or thermoplastic cases, like the daguerreotype photographs with which they are confused.
Ambrotypes were most popular during the mid- to late-1850s but continued to be available through the 1890s. In 1854, Cutting took out three patents relating to the process of creating images on glass using the wet plate collodion process. While Cutting is sometimes referred to as the inventor of the ambrotype, his three photographic patents of 1854 refer only to improvements in the process, rather than the idea of the collodion positive itself. Ambrotypes are reported to have been made at least as early as 1852 by Frederick Scott Archer. Patent Numbers 11,213, 11,266 and 11,267: Awarded to James Ambrose Cutting of Boston, Massachusetts in 1854 for creating collodion positive photographs on glass; the first and second of these patents refer to the chemicals & handling used in the collodion process, while the third describes a method for sealing finished collodion images beneath a layer of glass using balsam - the so-called Cutting's Patent Ambrotype. Patent Number 19,626: In 1858, James Ambrose Cutting & Lodowick H. Bradford of Boston, Massachusetts were awarded a patent for improvements in Photolithography.
They defined a process of created a durable photographic picture on a lithographic limestone printing plate. In 1859, he and Henry D Butler first opened their Boston Aquarial Gardens, a public aquarium on Bromfield Street, which they moved to 240 Washington Street, his partner wrote the book The Family Aquarium which published in 1858 was one of the first books written in the United States about the aquarium. The first advertisements for the Grand aquariums at the Boston Aquarial Gardens appeared in the April 12, 1859, edition of the Boston Post. "This magnificent display of one of the most fascinating phenomena of nature is now open for public exhibition," announced the Boston Post. "These Ocean Conservatories are filled with rare marine animals imported and collected for this Establishment. They present us with a perfect and striking illustration of Life Beneath The Waters." The facility was purchased by P. T. Barnum, under whose management it became more of a show-hall than a serious scientific establishment.
The property became the Theatre Comique in 1864-67. Distraught over the conversion of the Aquarial Gardens into an amusement hall, Cutting suffered a nervous collapse, from which he never recovered. Article in New York Times:'Death of an Inventor' Cutting, James A. Improvement in the Preparation of Collodion for Photographic Pictures, US Patent 11213, July 4, 1854. Cutting, James A. Improvement in Compositions for Making Photographic Pictures, US Patent 11266, July 11, 1854. Cutting, James A. Improvement in Photographic Pictures on Glass, US Patent 11267, July 11, 1854. James, Christopher The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, p. 372. New York Times, Death of an Inventor in an Insane Asylum, August 14, 1867. Potter, Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875, pp. 171–172. Schimmelman, Janice G. American Photographic Patents, The Daguerreotype & Wet Plate Era 1840-1880, p. 11. Schimmelman, Janice G; the Tintype in America 1856-1880, p. 14. Welling, William Photography in America, p. 111.
US Patents Online Ron Polito. "Boston Photographers Cited in 19th Century American Photographic Journals: A Bibliographic Database" – via Photographic Historical Society of New England