Sarah Angelina Acland

For Sarah Angelina Acland's mother, see Sarah Acland.

Sarah Angelina Acland
File:Self-portrait of Sarah Angelina Acland.jpg Early 20th-century colour self-portrait photograph of Sarah Angelina Acland.
Born	(1849-06-26)26 June 1849 Broad Street, Oxford, England
Died	Park Town, Oxford, England
Occupation	Photographer
Known for	Early colour photography
Parent(s)	Sir Henry Acland and Sarah Acland (nee Cotton)

Sarah Angelina ("Angie") Acland (26 June 1849 – 2 December 1930) was an English amateur photographer, known for her portraiture and as a pioneer of colour photography. She was credited by her contemporaries with inaugurating colour photography "as a process for the travelling amateur", by virtue of the photographs she took during two visits to Gibraltar in 1903 and 1904.

Life

Col. Willoughby Verner, 1903 photograph by Acland.

File:Sarah Acland 1903 Europa very early colour picture.jpg

View of the Europa Point Lighthouse in Gibraltar with the African mountain Jebel Musa across the Strait, 1903

Sarah Acland was the daughter of Sir Henry Wentworth Acland (1815–1900), Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, and Sarah Acland (née Cotton, 1815–1878), after whom the Acland Hospital in Oxford was named. She lived with her parents at 40–41 Broad Street, central Oxford.

As a child, Sarah Acland was photographed by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) with her friend Ina Liddell, the sister of Alice Liddell. At the age of 5, on 20 June 1855, she and one of her brothers presented a trowel to Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, Chancellor of Oxford University, at the laying of the foundation stone for the Oxford University Museum. The art critic John Ruskin taught her art and she also knew a number of the Pre-Raphaelites. She even assisted Dante Gabriel Rossetti when he was painting murals at the Oxford Union.

At the age of 19, Acland met and was influenced by photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Ackland took portraits and landscapes. For example, she took a portrait photograph of the Prime Minister William Gladstone during a visit by him to Oxford. On the death of her mother in 1878, Sarah became her father's housekeeper at the family home in Broad Street until his death in 1900. In 1885, she instigated a cabmen's shelter in the middle of Broad Street, which stood there until 1912.

Acland started to experiment with colour photography in 1899. Her earliest work was accomplished using the Ives Kromskop and Sanger Shepherd colour processes, in which three separate photographs were taken through red, green, and blue filters. In 1903 Acland visited her brother Admiral Acland at his home in Gibraltar. Acland took photographs of Europa Point looking out from Europe to Africa, pictures of flora in the Admiral's residence, The Mount, and the author and ornithologist Colonel William Willoughby Cole Verner. In 1904, she exhibited at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain with 33 three-colour prints under the title The Home of the Osprey, Gibraltar.

She later used the Autochrome process of the Lumiere brothers, introduced in 1907. In her later life after the death of her father, until her death in 1930, Sarah Acland lived in Park Town, North Oxford, taking many colour photographs there. She also visited and widely photographed on the Atlantic island of Madeira, staying at Reid's Hotel to the west of central Funchal.

Sarah Acland was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS) and the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). She never married and died in 1930 at her home in Park Town, Oxford.

Legacy

File:Red Hot Pokers and the Bay of Funchal by Sarah Angelina Acland.jpg

Funchal Bay, Madeira, by Sarah Angelina Acland, c.1910.

A collection of Acland's photographs is housed at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The Bodleian Library in Oxford has catalogues of her photograph albums and papers, (together with those of her father Henry Acland), dating from the late 19th century.

See also

• E. J. Bowen, chemist, who later lived in the same house as Sarah Acland in Park Town, Oxford
• List of women photographers

External links

• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons
• Sarah Angelina Acland photographs in Google Images
• Photograph of Sarah Angelina Acland at the National Portrait Gallery (London)