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HomeContents > People > Photographers > Camille Silvy

Names:
Other: C. Silvy 
Other: Camille de Silvy 
Other: Camille Silvy 
Other: Camille-Leon-Louis Silvy 
Dates:  1834, 18 May - 1910, 2 February
Born:  France, Eure-et-Loir, Nogent-le-Rotrou
Died:  France
Active:  UK
 
  
French landscape and portrait photographer who moved to London in 1859 and became one of the leading carte-de-visite photographers. 
  
Stereographs project 
  
Business locations 
  
Bayswater, London, England, UK 
  
[Camille Silvy] French aristocrat & photog., set up studio in London 59; specialized in views of women; retired ÷63. Stereos rare, 2 reported, most work was in SI formats, esp. CDVs. 
  
T.K. Treadwell & William C. Darrah (Compiled by), Wolfgang, Sell (Updated by), 11/28/2003, Photographers of the World (Non-USA), (National Stereoscopic Association)
Credit: National Stereoscopic Association with corrections and additions by Alan Griffiths and others.
NOTE: You are probably here because you have a stereograph to identify. Please email good quality copies of the front and back to alan@luminous-lint.com so we can create reference collections for all.

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Camille Silvy
Camille Silvy (Self portrait) 
1863-1864
 
  
Family history 
  
If you are related to this photographer and interested in tracking down your extended family we can place a note here for you to help. It is free and you would be amazed who gets in touch. 
  
alan@luminous-lint.com
 
  
 
  

Exhibitions on this website

Theme: Portrait
ThumbnailThe Commercial Portraiture of Camille Silvy 
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Supplemental information

 

Camille Silvy

Born at Nogent-le-Rotrou (Eure-et-Loire) on 18 May 1834, Camille Silvy came from a distinguished French family of Italian ancestry. He learnt photography from Count Olympe Aguado and exhibited some landscapes as an amateur at Edinburgh and Paris before opening a studio in London towards the end of 1859 or at the very beginning of 1860. The possibility that he was the first photographer in London to work in the new carte-de-visite format is often put forward, but this honour more probably lies with Messrs. Day of Piccadilly.
 
To gain publicity when the studio first opened, Silvy produced, in the first few months of 1860, a series of portraits of theatrical and operatic stars. He quickly attracted a clientele drawn from the upper echelons of society, although the daybooks show that there was a downward shift in the social standing of his clientele later in the decade. At the height of ‘Cartomania’ in the summer of 1861, he was personally conducting as many as forty sittings a day, but the following year he began the habit of leaving the studio in the hands of others during the winter months, at first in those of his partner, Auguste Renoult, and then, after the partnership was dissolved in May 1864, in those of other members of his staff. By 1868 the popularity of the carte format had significantly declined, and Silvy closed the studio, marking the occasion with a Grande Après-midi Photographique et Musicale held on 17 July 1868 in aid of the French Hospital, Leicester Square. His negatives were acquired by Adolphe Beau, and the contents of the studio, including Silvy's camera equipment and the luxurious properties that had decorated his sets, were auctioned by Messrs. Bonham on 16 December 1872.
 
Silvy accepted a minor consular post in Exeter, possibly in the hope that it might lead on to a career as a diplomat, but at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he returned to France. His health destroyed – in his opinion, by the chemicals he had handled in the darkroom – he spent nearly the last forty years of his life in a sanatorium. He died there on 2 February 1910 and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
 
Throughout the time that he was in London, Silvy kept daybooks in which he, or members of his staff, recorded the day-to-day activity of the studio, probably as a device for locating negatives when clients wished to reorder, but possibly also as an aide-memoire for Silvy. These daybooks comprise one unmounted print from each sitting, pasted in under a sitting number, four to a page, with the name of the sitter entered above. From volume two onwards, the date was also recorded daily. There are some seventeen thousand sittings, spread over twelve volumes, but these contain various lacunae, some inexplicable. There were once thirteen volumes, but volume eleven, covering July 1863 to June 1864, is lost. The National Portrait Galley acquired the surviving twelve volumes in 1904.
 
[Contributed by Paul Frecker] 
  
 

Internet biographies

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Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. Go to website
Grove Art Online (www.groveart.com) has a biography of this artist. 
[NOTE: This is a subscription service and you will need to pay an annual fee to access the content.]
 Go to website
 

Printed biographies

The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers.

 
• Beaton, Cecil & Buckland, Gail 1975 The Magic Eye: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company) p.58 [Useful short biographies with personal asides and one or more example images.] 
  
• Weaver, Mike (ed.) 1989 The Art of Photography 1839-1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) p.466 [This exhibition catalogue is for the travelling exhibition that went to Houston, Canberra and London in 1989.] 
  
• Witkin, Lee D. and Barbara London 1979 The Photograph Collector’s Guide (London: Secker and Warburg) p.234 [Long out of print but an essential reference work - the good news is that a new edition is in preparation.] 
  
 

Useful printed stuff

If there is an analysis of a single photograph or a useful self portrait I will highlight it here.

 
• Naef, Weston 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum - Handbook of the Photographic Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum) p.53, 58 
  
• Naef, Weston 2004 Photographers of Genius at the Getty (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum) [For this photographer there is a description and three sample photographs from the Getty collection. p.40-43] 
  
 
  
 
  
 
  
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