Frank Meadow Sutcliffe

(b Headingley, Yorks, 6 Oct 1853; d Whitby, Yorks, 31 May 1941). English photographer. He was the son of the painter and etcher Thomas Sutcliffe (1828-81) and spent his early years in Whitby. He took up photography around 1871 and in 1872-3 photographed Yorkshire castles and abbeys for the photographic firm of Francis Frith. He made an unsuccessful bid to establish a fashionable portrait photography studio in Tunbridge Wells, Kent (1875), and returned to Whitby in 1876, where he did set up a business. He soon discovered a conflict between what he considered to be a good photograph and what he could sell. His clients made it clear that boldly lit portraits were unacceptable, so he had to use a north-facing studio with white walls to ensure a soft, luminous lighting to please his sitters.

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Sutcliffe, Frank Meadow (1853-1941), English photographer based in Whitby, North Yorkshire. The son of a watercolour painter, he took up photography in the late 1860s. In 1876, after failing to establish himself in fashionable Tunbridge Wells, he opened a studio in Whitby, a fishing and seafaring town gradually developing into a resort. For decades he scraped a living from commercial portraiture, earning little from the work that eventually made him famous: subtly observed, atmospheric views of Whitby and the surrounding countryside, and studies of fisherfolk and rustics. Particularly celebrated was Water Rats (1886), of naked urchins disporting themselves in the harbour. In 1888 Sutcliffe had a large one-man show at the London Camera Club, and by 1905 he had won 62 British and foreign awards. Despite Whitby's remoteness, he kept abreast of technical developments and aesthetic debates, especially about photographic realism. His lack of interest in pictorial anecdote, willingness to flout convention, and eye for pattern and form now seem proto-modern. Although he worked for years with cumbersome glass-plate equipment, he enjoyed using portable cameras lent to him by Kodak c.1900. A shrewd, sometimes acerbic commentator on the photographic scene, he contributed to numerous journals and wrote a column for the Yorkshire Weekly Post for 22 years. After selling his business in 1922 he became curator of a Whitby museum.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Hiley, M., Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, Photographer of Whitby (1974)