This is a featured article for the topic amateur photography, history.
Lionel de Rothschild (1882-1942), the author's grandfather and namesake, supposedly described himself, only half jokingly, as ‘a banker by hobby but a gardener by profession’. His passion for gardening and above all for one genus, the rhododendron, led him to create the extraordinary 250-acre woodland garden at Exbury in the New Forest between the wars. It is possible that his eye for colour and placing can be seen in, and developed out of, his earlier experiments with photography; at all events, the same careful aesthetic governed his juxtaposition of plants to avoid clashes and led to his emphasis on pure colours in his hybrids. It may even be that his love of the pastel hues stemmed in part from the essential softness of the autochrome process, though such things can never be definitively or indeed sensibly ascribed. His understanding of light certainly remained photographic: he used to time his tours so that he would come to one particular group of red rhododendrons with the sun shining through them.
Both interests can be seen in his father Leo, who created beautiful gardens at Gunnersbury outside London and at Ascott in Buckinghamshire and who, to judge from his absence from the numerous albums in the Rothschild Archive in London, was himself a keen amateur photographer. But, as with gardening, it was Lionel who showed himself the professional, proud of his achievement. He took photographs especially for his father of Japanese-style gardens near Lake Como in Italy, which the head gardener, James Hudson, used to help him design the Japanese garden at Gunnersbury in the early 1900s, and these were shown later when Hudson lectured on its genesis to the Royal Horticultural Society. In the black-and-white collection are a number of standard-sized albums with small prints, many of them holiday snaps taken later in his life cruising the Adriatic in his yacht Rhodora. There are also larger albums with prints of his earlier travels, especially in Spain, and two enormous bound volumes with selected photographs printed to a high standard and enlarged, one photograph to each 35.6 × 50.8 cm (14 × 20 in) page. Many of these, including views of Spain and the Riviera, are extremely fine, showing an exceptional sense of composition and tonality.
Over 700, mostly autochrome, glass plates survive, in varying shapes and sizes—equivalent to a mere 1 per cent of the Albert Kahn collection, but a sizeable number in anybody else's terms. Among them, first and foremost, are many fine portraits, pictures of his family and friends, some carefully posed for the camera, others insouciantly reading. Some are identifiable, like those of his father in hunting pink, or his bride Marie-Louise Beer taken on their engagement day and then on their honeymoon in 1912. Others are not: a black-haired girl in a wicker armchair, a middle-aged man with an election rosette and a newspaper. Lionel seems to have attempted only a handful of still lifes: vases of flowers, a nicely observed close-up of lilies (carefully off centre) next to a stone seat, corn drying on a wall. His successes make one wish he had done more of this sort of photograph, but he probably did not have that kind of patience—the patience to wait years for his hybrids to flower, certainly, but not the patience to nudge a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers. There is a series of outstanding pictures of animals, taken at London Zoo. There are landscapes, generally taken on holiday in Europe—a sunlit bay on the Mediterranean, a harbour wall crowded with people—and finally a large number of pictures of gardens, some rather less successful than others, more in the nature of recording a particular aspect or interesting planting.
The bulk of the pictures are half plate, and two of Lionel's half-plate cameras survive, still in surprisingly good working order: a Marion tropical reflex and a Ross tropical field camera, all beautifully polished teak and lacquered brass in their fitted pigskin cases, with Lionel's name on the side. There is also a collection of Zeiss lenses, finely crafted tropical double dark slides, a Wynne's Infallible Exposure Meter shaped like a pocket watch, and even some Rapid Deadmatch paper. The whole outfit is redolent of the exquisite craftsmanship and luxury of a bygone era. There is one photograph of him using one of the cameras, dressed in army uniform; but most of the plates seem to have been taken in the few years before and after the First World War.
How Lionel chose to view his pictures is not known. He installed a drop-down screen when he remodelled the house, but that was probably used later, for films sent down from London for the amusement of his weekend guests. He himself turned his attention increasingly to gardening; indeed, perhaps 90 per cent of his extant private correspondence concerns matters horticultural. He took a handful of snaps and a small amount of cine footage, but of his own garden there seems to exist not a single autochrome; his interest had moved on.
