George Washington Wilson

(b Banffshire [now Grampian], 7 Feb 1823; d Aberdeen, 9 March 1893). Scottish photographer and painter. He served an apprenticeship as a carpenter but decided to become a painter and trained at art schools in Edinburgh and London. After several years as a drawing-master in Aberdeen, he joined the photographic business of John Hay jr in 1853. In 1855 Wilson opened his own photographic studio in Aberdeen. By the 1860s it was one of the most prolific and successful photographic businesses in Scotland. He won international acclaim as a landscape photographer and was particularly famed for his instantaneous photographs such as View in Leith Docks (undated albumen print; Edinburgh, N.P.G.), which makes telling use of contre-jour effects in the silhouetting of ships' masts against the sky. He received royal patronage, becoming photographer to Queen Victoria in Scotland. At the International Exhibition of 1862, Wilson was awarded a medal for 'the beauty of his small pictures of clouds, shipping, waves etc. from nature'. From 1876 he relied on assistant photographers to provide new negatives, employing a large staff of photographers and studio assistants, and by the 1880s Wilson was running the world's largest photographic printing establishment at St Swithin, Aberdeen. The initials 'GWW' appear on all of the photographs produced by the Wilson firm, which was taken over by his sons after his death, but do not indicate that Wilson was himself the photographer in every case. The firm's output of albumen prints from wet collodion negatives was generally of a technically high standard. Mass-produced, picturesque views such as Tighnalechan, Aberfeldy (albumen print; Edinburgh, N.P.G.) were the precursors of the picture postcard and served much the same purpose.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Wilson, George Washington (1823-93), Scottish photographer, originally trained as a miniature painter. By the mid-19th century tourism was flourishing, and Wilson's business, established in Aberdeen in 1852, met a huge demand for wet-plate views of Scotland. In the early phase of his career he undertook lengthy photographic tours, laden with equipment and sometimes accompanied by his friend the bookseller George Walker. The resulting pictures, trademarked GWW, soon established Wilson's reputation and did much to publicize regions like the Scottish Highlands. Later he extended his reach to England. Finally, his staff photographers reached Australia. The firm eventually held 45, 000 negatives and advertised 25, 000 views of Scotland and England and produced portraits, stereograms, cartes de visite, postcards, and albums. Commissions, from 1854 onwards, to photograph Balmoral Castle and members of the royal family brought Wilson the prestigious and lucrative title of ‘Photographer to the Queen’.

Wilson published a guide to the wet-collodion process in 1855. In 1859 he made prints of sky and sea from a single negative and froze, photographically, movement in Edinburgh's Princes Street. By 1880 G. W. Wilson & Co. was probably the largest producer of views in Britain, with a network of outlets in shops and railway stations, and its Aberdeen premises were a substantial industrial enterprise. After Wilson's death—hastened perhaps by long-term exposure to chemicals—it failed to adapt to changing commercial conditions and foundered in 1908. The firm's surviving negatives are held at Aberdeen University.

George Washington WilsonFingal's Cave, Staffa, 1860s. Albumen print

— William Buchanan

Bibliography

• Taylor, R., George Washington Wilson (1981)

Queen Victoria on 'Fyvie' with John Brown at Balmoral, by George Washington Wilson, 1863; medium: carte de visite, size: 9.20 x 6.10 cm; from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland

George Washington Wilson (7 February 1823 - 9 March 1893) ^[1] was a pioneering Scottish photographer.

After studying art in Edinburgh and London, Wilson returned to his native city of Aberdeen in 1849 and established a business as a portrait miniaturist catering to the wealthy families of the North East of Scotland. After some years of mediocre success, Wilson ventured into portrait photography in 1852 setting a portrait studio with John Hay in 25 Crown Street in Aberdeen. From there, aided by his well-developed technical and commercial acumen and a contract to photograph the Royal Family while documenting the building of Balmoral Castle in 1854-1855, he established himself as one of Scotland's premier photographers working for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1860 ^[1].

Pioneering the development of techniques for photography outside of the studio and the mass production of photographic prints, he moved increasingly from portraiture to landscape photography in the 1860s. He also produced stereoscopic pictures which main characteristic was that the exposures were very short. By 1864 he claimed to have sold over half a million prints. At the time of his death in 1893 his business employed 40 staff and was one of the largest publishers of photographic prints in the world, competing with James Valentine, who was also a prolific photographer, with a large company in Dundee.

Collection

Over 40,000 of Wilson's photographic plates still exist today, largely due to the meticulous washing and chemical treatments he insisted on. Aberdeen University is in possession of some 38,000 of these, which were donated by an Aberdeen photographer, the late Archibald J.B. Strachan, in 1958.

External links

• Works in the National Galleries of Scotland
• The University of Aberdeen Photographic Archives
• The George Washington Wilson Photographic Archive: a Postscript by R.V. Pringle
• Courtauld Institute G.W. Wilson Samples
• Scottish Scenery by G.W. Wilson

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Getty Museum

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