Carte-de-visite collection

The RHS Lindley Library houses a collection of over 700 carte-de-visite photographs including some cabinet cards, mostly of 19th-century botanists and gardeners, many of whom were never depicted in published sources. The collection is, therefore, an unrivalled source of otherwise unobtainable portraits for nurserymen, amateur growers of florists' flowers, garden designers, professional gardeners, botanists, RHS officials, and entomologists of the period. One of the earliest cards in the collection depicts George McEwen, head gardener at Arundel Castle and latterly at the Horticultural Society, who died in 1858. The last of the cards is that for Frederick Chittenden, made in 1900, by which time cartes-de-visite had largely fallen from fashion. There is a small selection of commercially published images of notable personalities, including Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and John Faraday. Of the few women shown individually are the daffodil grower Mrs R.O. Backhouse and flower painter Anne Pratt. The collection also contains a representative selection of the work of British and European portrait photographers; a range of styles, including tinted photographs; and one trick photograph (the American entomologist Samuel Scudder, who is shown playing chess with himself). French photographer, André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri, patented the cartes-de-visite process in 1854. An albumen print on thin paper was pasted on a slightly larger card, 4x2¼ inches, which could bear the photographer's logo and details on the back. Most of the cartes in our collection are in this format; a certain number are cabinet cards, measuring 6½x4½ inches, a format that became popular in the 1870s. The majority of cartes entered the collection from one of two sources: One album comprising the collection of the Society's former Assistant Secretary, Andrew Murray (1812-1878); containing a number of entomologists as well as botanists, and several unidentified photographs of members of Murray's family. Murray never labelled his album, preferring instead to insert signatures clipped from letters underneath the photographs Five albums comprising the collection of Richard Dean (1830-1905), seedsman and market gardener, and horticultural journalist; as he travelled the country visiting nurseries and attending flower shows, he compiled a large collection of cartes de visite of the nurserymen and florists. He was also the organising secretary for the International Botanical Congress of 1866, and one of his albums consisted of cartes de visite of attendees, such as botanists and other dignitaries (including the King and Queen of the Belgians). Arrangement: At some point the CDV albums were dismantled and the individual cartes repackaged and arranged alphabetically by surname, resulting in the loss of original provenance and contextual information. Additional items have been added subsequently.