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‘First I Lost My Pen And Now I’ve Lost My Spectacles’, Oscar Gustave Rejlander © The Royal Photographic Society Collection Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was also prepared to reveal a sense of humour in his work. He favoured sentimental genre studies, narrative tableaux and portraits with a strong theatrical or emotional element. Rejlander’s choice of photographic subject matter was clearly influenced by the works of art he’d studied as a young man. ‘Sweet Slumber’, c.1860, Oscar Gustave Rejlander © The Royal Photographic Society Collection However, given the complexity of the wet-plate process which Rejlander used, this claim seems somewhat unlikely. He later claimed that he was almost entirely self-taught, his instruction being confined to a single afternoon’s tuition from Nicholaas Henneman, William Henry Fox Talbot’s former valet and assistant. The precise date that Rejlander arrived in Britain isn’t known, but during the early 1840s he was living in Lincoln and working as a portrait painter, before settling in Wolverhampton in 1846.
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Bad Temper, c.1865, Oscar Gustave Rejlander © The Royal Photographic Society Collection He himself claimed that this moment of revelation came in 1852 after he’d bought some photographic reproductions of classical sculptures and was captivated by how photography succeeded in capturing the complicated folds of drapery. It was perhaps as a result of his early experience as a painter that Rejlander realised how useful photography could be to artists. Probably born in Sweden (again, this is not certain), Rejlander studied painting as a young man, and later moved to Rome where he made a living making copies of Renaissance paintings. Rejlander, we have but a brief record, derived from his incidental remarks in conversation.Įven the fact that he was born in 1813 is conjecture-deduced from the age written on his death certificate.Ī flamboyant, colourful, theatrical figure, Rejlander may well have actively cultivated a sense of mystery surrounding his origins. In his obituary The Photographic News wrote: Very little is known about Rejlander’s early life. 1865, Oscar Gustave Rejlander © The Royal Photographic Society Collection This year will see a number of events to mark the bi-centenary of the birth of Oscar Gustave Rejlander, ‘the father of art photography’. This year is the bicentenary of the birth of Rejlander, the flamboyant and mysterious photographer who pioneered the painstaking technique of combination printing.