William England

English | British, 1816-1896

BiographyWilliam England (1816-1896) was a British photographer best known for his technical contributions towards the development of the stereoscopic camera and his landscape images taken while travelling through England and the United States and subsequently the European alpine region.

He began his photographic career as a London daguerreotypist in the early 1840s and built a reputation as a talented technician and portraitist. In 1854, he joined the newly-founded London Stereoscopic Company as a principal photographer, producing images with a special camera that took two nearly-identical images side-by-side which, when viewed through a stereoscope, appeared three-dimensional. During the nine years he spent with the company, England was largely responsible for building their global reputation by photographing foreign destinations that were commercially licensed to publishers and printers in Europe and abroad. He also made technical innovations to the stereoscopic camera, a camera ideally suited to the wonders of travel, most notably a lens with variable openings. His views of travel destinations in North America were some of the first distributed in Europe, and his photograph of a tightrope walker above Niagara Falls (The Great Blondin, 1858) sold over 100,000 copies, making it the most popular stereoscopic image of all time.

Embarking on a freelance career in 1863, he began to specialize in European alpine views through the patronage and support of the British Alpine Club. England published his first major album containing 77 panoramic albumen prints of Switzerland, Savoy, and Italy in 1865, quickly followed by a second album of 72 views along the Rhine River in 1867. He set up a printing studio at his home in Notting Hill, London in 1867 and continued to travel and print his images throughout the rest of his life.

In addition to exhibiting and selling his landscape views, England was made a member of the London Photographic Society in 1871 and in 1886 was elected President of the Photographic Society of Great Britain. In 1889, he became chairman of the West London Photographic Society and ran the Solar Club of Great Britain from 1890 until his death in 1896.

England’s work can be found in the Toledo Museum of Art’s collection as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Eastman Museum, Rochester; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions.

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