A woman examines sunflowers on a garden path, with the composition balanced by a large sundial at foreground right. When originally taken in 1899, the composition featured a peacock beyond the sundial in the garden path, but for some reason was excised in this photogravure version. See the link at the V&A Museum in this post for original version.

Exhibited as part of the Forty-fourth Annual Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in 1899 and published in the pages of the Photogram that year, a critic weighed in on this work:

…”in his large upright scene. My Lady’s Garden (288), reproduced on page 63, he has contrived to approach a high pictorial ideal. To this picture the most important place in the wall, opposite the entrance, has been allotted, and there is no other picture in the room more worthy of the position, for it is a subject which tells well even from a distance. The difficulty of placing a figure in a landscape is here displayed, and, let it be admitted, partly overcome. The work gains nothing by examination in detail, for in technique it is faulty in more than one direction. The Chinese white applied to the sunflowers near the foreground is not only unnecessary but even a disadvantage, for those high lights might have been left a little lower in tone. The hand work on the peacock’s back, and the peeling of the carbon from its support near the top of the picture, are minor faults which it would be ungracious to point out but for the fact that with many visitors to the exhibition who are anxious to appreciate all that is good, these technical blemishes, slight though they are, overshadow the whole merit of the picture. A man who can do such work as this is not treating himself quite fairly when he allows it to be handicapped by small matters, and if they are the result of haste in preparation, the work is so good that it might have seemed worth while to save it until next year rather than submit an imperfect impression.” (pp. 146-48)

Alex Keighley: 1861-1947

Keighley, 1861-1947, a member of the Linked Ring, was considered the leading British pictorialist photographer between 1910-1920.

“Alexander Keighley was the son of a wealthy Yorkshire mill owner. His father, Joseph Keighley, was of knightly descent. Keighley studied at the Keighley Trade and Grammar School, which later came to be known as the Mechanics Institute. The institute placed an emphasis on science and practical skills. Keighley was particularly interested in biology and won a scholarship to continue his scientific studies at the School of Mines (later the Royal College of Science) in London. He was particularly enthusiastic about the lectures by Thomas Huxley, with whom he studied biology, geology and botany. In 1879 he became a founding member of the Keighley Scientific and Literary Society. Keighley then planned to study medicine, but no sooner had his courses finished than his father obliged him to join the family business. Keighley would go on to become a director of the Sudgen Keighley Company in 1886 and remain so until his retirement in 1923.

In 1905 Keighley married Lily Howroyd of Bradford. Alexander Keighley died on 2 August 1947, in the town that shares his name, Keighley.” Wikipedia- (2024)

The Linked Ring

Alexandar Keighley was elected 30 October, 1900. His Pseudonym was Forester; and became a severed Link on 10 May 1909. (1.)

1. The Linked Ring:The Secession in Photography 1892-1910, Margaret Harker: 1979, p. 184