Carlos Relvas
Relvas, Carlos (1838-94), Portuguese landowner, wine grower, bullfighter, and amateur photographer. Born into a wealthy farming family at Golegã, c. 100 km (60 miles) from Lisbon, Relvas had practically unlimited means to pursue photography when he took it up c. 1861. He was admitted to the Société Française de Photographie in 1869, and over the next couple of decades, thanks to success at major exhibitions (to some of which he submitted wine as well as photographs) in Europe and the USA, became internationally celebrated. In the 1870s he built a lavishly equipped studio on his estate and introduced the collotype process into Portugal. Although many of his most important pictures were of historic buildings and monuments, his surviving photographs also include portraits and self-portraits, animals, Portuguese and foreign landscapes, ‘popular types’, and genre and fishing scenes. A particularly fascinating series documents the new self-righting lifeboat Relvas designed and personally demonstrated at Oporto in 1883. The previous year he had made 512 collotype prints of exhibits in the Lisbon Exhibition of Ornamental Art—a milestone in exhibition technology.
Although Relvas's death was treated as a national event, his achievements were soon forgotten. In 1988, however, initial steps were taken to restore both his photographs and the ‘House of Photography’ at Golegã, probably the only large-scale 19th-century photographic studio still in existence.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Carlos Relvas and the House of Photography (2003)
