Alice Hughes

Alice Mary Hughes (1857–1939) was a leading London portrait photographer specializing in images of fashionable women and children.^[1]

Biography

Hughes was the eldest daughter of the portrait painter Edward Robert Hughes. After studying photography at the London Polytechnic she opened a studio in 1891 next to her father's in Gower Street, London which she operated until December 1910.^[2] In her day, she was a leading photographer of royalty, fashionable women and children producing elegant platinotype prints. During her most successful periods, she employed up to 60 women and took up to 15 sittings a day.^[3] In 1914, for a short period before the First World War, she ran a business in Berlin but returned to London at the beginning or the war, opening a studio in Ebury Street in 1915.^[3][4] The Ebury Street studio was not as successful as her first business and she closed it in 1933, retiring to Worthing where she died after a fall in her bedroom in 1939.^[5]

From 1898 to 1909, she contributed several hundred portraits to Country Life. In 1910, she sold 50,000 negatives to Speaight Ltd.^[5]

Assessment

A pioneer of portrait photography, Hughes developed a distinctive style "by fusing the conventions of society portraiture with the cool, monochromatic tones of the platinum print." (From Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)^[3]

Gallery

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  Queen Mary (1905)

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  Lady Jellicoe (1917)

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  Pauline Astor (1904)

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  Alexandra of Denmark (1902)

References

Further reading

• Hughes, Alice (1923). My Father and I. T. Butterworth, Limited. 
• Heron, Liz; Williams, Val (1996). Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. I.B.Tauris. pp. 3–. ISBN 978-1-86064-041-4.