Susan Franklen's photograph album by Iwan Meical Jones.
Reproduced from Friend of the Library magazine, Spring 2003.
Overview
On Friday 10 May 2002, a tiny photograph album, measuring less than 5" by 4", was offered for sale at Christie's by the descendants of Margaret Story Maskelyne. The album was inscribed `Susan M Franklen', and 17 of the 43 images it contained were initialled `M.U - Mary Dillwyn. These names and the subject matter of the photographs showed that the album was closely associated with Glamorgan, with Swansea, and with Penlle'r-gaer, during the early 1850s. Some of the photographs can be traced in other Swansea albums of this period, when the town was the home of a number of photographic pioneers. However, the album itself was quite dissimilar to the other albums of the Swansea circle of photographers. It was considerable smaller in size and its selection of images was unusual, being indefinably but distinctly different to other collections. The story of how the album eventually came to be bought by the National Library of Wales is outlined elsewhere in this publication. The aim of this brief note is to explain why the album was felt to be special. It should be emphasised that this is a preliminary note, written without the benefit of the detailed research regarding the individual images in the album which is necessary before firm conclusions can be drawn about the album's origin and date.
Photography in Swansea
It is no accident that Swansea is so closely associated with early photography. In the early nineteenth century the town was a magnet for ambitious and intelligent men who saw a future or a fortune for themselves in the new industries which powered the town's growth. The key to the development of industry was the Swansea Canal, which brought coal down the Swansea Valley to the port. This source of cheap energy created economically favourable conditions for the development of industries such as copper smelting. Lewis Weston Dillwyn, father of Mary Dillwyn, was one industrialist who settled at Swansea, where he ran the Cambrian Pottery. The town became a centre for middle-class society within Wales, and Dr Prys Morgan has described it as being the place where Merthyr met Tenby - where the industrial boom met the genteel tastes of polite society. Swansea became a centre for artists but it was also the home of a number of distinguished scientists, whose knowledge was essential to the new industries. This amalgam of art and science was perhaps a necessary social condition for the invention of photography, announced to the public in 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot had spent much of his youth at Penrice Castle on the Gower Peninsula with his Welsh cousins, and is known to have found the intellectual life of Swansea vigorous and stimulating.
After announcing his discovery, Henry Talbot sent samples of his new process to Penrice, and on 28 February 1839 his cousin Charlotte Traherne (nč£ Talbot) wrote to thank him for them:
I am charmed with the piece of hair [a photogenic drawing] you sent, it is much too pretty for you to have it again. John Llewelyn has been making some paper according to your process and they have all been trying little scraps of hair and ribbon and succeeded very well this morning before breakfast ... Mr Calvert Jones is quite wild about it ...
That was probably the first day of photography in Wales, and Charlotte Traherne's letter mentions the two young men who became Wales's most committed early photographers - John Dillwyn Llewelyn (son of Lewis Weston Dillwyn) and Calvert Richard Jones. Both men are now recognised as major photographic pioneers. The work of the Dillwyn Llewelyn family in particular, is well known from the albums kept by the family, in which we are given a wonderfully vivid view of life within an enlightened and privileged family circle. The world depicted is that which existed within the walls of the great estates, or within the social conventions of the time. John Dillwyn Llewelyn was a scientist, and many of his photographs are studies of nature; some might be described as scientific specimens. Calvert Jones was an artist before he became a photographer, and his photographs of ships and his portraits of servants are often close to the studies he drew in water-colour years earlier, before photography existed. It seems strange to us now that so little attempt was made to use photography in order to record ordinary life. Nevertheless, few of the earliest photographers made any attempt in their work to document the life of ordinary people. For example, before the late 1850s there are hardly any photographic images of the great copper works, of the Cambrian Pottery, or of the life of the town of Swansea.
Mary Dillwyn's photographs
It has been known for some time that some of the most attractive and approachable images in the albums of the Dillwyn Llewelyn family were taken by Mary Dillwyn, daughter of Lewis Weston Dillwyn and sister of John Dillwyn Llewelyn. For many of her pictures she was known to have used a small camera, which, forming a smaller image, needed less light and allowed for shorter exposures. At this time her brother John Dillwyn Llewelyn, a skilled chemist, was successfully developing new photographic techniques that allowed him to take `instantaneous pictures' that even `froze' the waves of the sea, forming a lasting record of an instant of time. Whereas the male photographers tended to take carefully-posed portraits that have a considerable degree of formality, Mary Dillwyn's portraits are more informal, spontaneous, and approachable. She was able to take photographs that were almost instantaneous and that showed, for the first time, transient expressions of feeling and emotions - including, perhaps for the first time ever, smiling children. She was even able to photograph family pets. Her portraits show her friends and family in a remarkably relaxed manner, lacking the formality or restraint shown in most portraiture of the period. In this she was evidently stretching the social conventions of the period and using photography in a naturalistic way, well suited to the nature of photography itself.
Contents of the Album
The appearance of this tiny album at auction presented the Library with a rare, indeed a unique opportunity to acquire a collection of work of Mary Dillwyn, a very important early female photographer. In her intimate portraits we have a woman's response to photography: it is a response that is both modest and unmistakably feminine, and largely unrecognised and undervalued because of that. The album includes thirteen portraits, eighteen still-life studies with flowers, six studies of fowl and five outdoor scenes, including one of a snowman. Lewis Weston Dillwyn was a distinguished botanist, and his diary shows that his children were well acquainted with both flora and fauna. There is scope to consider the implication of the botanical studies in the album as well as the intriguing photographs of exotic fowl.
Mary Dillwyn's family
The Library is grateful for valuable information relating to the album and the family that has kindly been provided by Mr Richard Morris, who is an expert on early photography and is married to a descendent of the Dillwyn Llewelyn family. The recipient of the album, Susan Franklen, daughter of Richard Franklen and Isabella Talbot of Penrice, was disabled, and although very interested in photography, she is not thought to have been able to carry out much photographic work herself. Susan Franklen would have been about eighteen years of age when she received the album, assuming that it was compiled about 1853, whereas Mary Dillwyn would have been almost twenty years older. Mary's brother John had married Emma Talbot, sister of Isabella Franklen, Susan Franklen's mother.
The album was almost certainly a gift to Susan Franklen, and although its contents reflect the taste and interests of the young women of Penlle'r-gaer, it is not certain that all the images it contains were taken by Mary Dillwyn, nor that it was compiled by her. There were, and there remain, many questions about the images and their authorship, but the album's contents show an unmistakably feminine quality and in this, perhaps, lies its distinctiveness. In the course of securing the album, many details have already come to light, but others remain uncertain - for example, the exact date of compiling the album cannot be fixed until more comparative information is available about the images.
Mary Dillwyn and the golden age of photography
Most photographs by Mary Dillwyn date to the 1840s and 1850s, the great period of the calotype and the well-born amateur photographer. Her work is remarkable because it is so naturalistic, intimate, and apparently spontaneous. Hardly any other photographer of the period takes us into such close contact with the subjects of their portraits. In retrospect the 1840s and 1850s were a golden age for amateur photographers who could afford to take up the new invention, and their artistic achievement in the medium has rarely, if ever, been surpassed. After her marriage to the Reverend Montague Earle Welby in 1857, Mary's involvement with photography seems to have slackened, as did that of many other leading photographers of the `calotype age'. Photography had entered a new era - that of the carte-de-visite and the professional photographers' studio. As photography's audience widened and the mass market developed, the artistic quality of the photographs plummeted.
This small album, therefore, is an icon from the golden age of photography, and is exceptional because it contains a feminine response to the new art form. Mary Dillwyn was a woman at the centre of great events in Victorian England, amidst the industrial and intellectual ferment that was nineteenth-century Swansea. The discovery of photography came out of that background, and the artistic expression that was achieved through photography by the young women of Penlle'r-gaer deserves to be far more widely acknowledged. The Library's success in securing the album is an important step in gaining for Mary Dillwyn and her circle the recognition that their work deserves.
