Frank Meadow Sutcliffe: Whitby photographer’s medals auctioned
- Published
Medals awarded to a Victorian photographer whose work catalogued life in a 19th Century fishing port are to go under the hammer.
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe's photographs of Whitby, in North Yorkshire, established his reputation as an artist.
Sutcliffe, who died in 1941, was awarded dozens of medals by photographic societies and clubs across the UK and abroad.
They are being sold at auction later and are expected to raise up to £3,000.
Frank Sutcliffe was born in Headingley, Leeds, the eldest child of the watercolourist painter Thomas Sutcliffe.
The family moved to Whitby, where they had spent their summer holidays, shortly before his father's death in 1871.
Although a fishing port, Whitby was also a popular tourist destination in the Victorian period and Sutcliffe established his own photographic studio to take portraits of wealthy visitors.
The work was lucrative, but Sutcliffe was also inspired to capture images of everyday scenes, people in the town and the surrounding countryside.
Michael Shaw, from the online Sutcliffe Gallery, said Sutcliffe wanted to create art rather than just a photograph and the resulting images had "universal appeal".
"They were posed, but he managed to not make them appear posed. They were carefully thought about," he said.
Mr Shaw's father purchased 1,500 of Sutcliffe's original glass plate negatives in the late 1950s and they have been preserved since then.
He said Sutcliffe managed to create pictures which told their own story and people looking at the photographs did not need to know who those featured were.
"He was accepted as one of the finest photographers of the day - as shown by all the medals he was awarded," Mr Shaw said.
In 1888, the recently founded Photography Club of Great Britain held its first one-man exhibition and chose Sutcliffe's work as its subject.
His growing reputation among other photographers fed into the public sphere, also helping to increase Whitby's popularity and artistic reputation.
Mr Shaw said: "Evidently, Whitby was known as the photographers' Mecca because of his work."
The images also revealed the affection and empathy he had for both the town and its people, Mr Shaw added.
Sutcliffe's most famous photograph, Water Rats (1886), featured naked children playing in a boat, which saw him condemned by local clergymen.
However, a copy of the picture was purchased by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII.
Dix Noonan Webb auctioneers are due to sell a total of 56 medals awarded to Sutcliffe between 1874 and 1897 in one lot later.
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