The following commentary appeared on the index page for this photo: “This picture was awarded one of the prizes in the Amateur Competition in this journal. The scene is about four miles from Newport, R. I., at the South-eastern end of the Island, opposite the West Island Fishing Club. The negative was made in September, when the wind is apt to be fresh and the waves lively. Mr. Taylor was lucky in catching the flying spray in mid-air.”

Henry Richmond Taylor: 1869-1925

Obituary, The New York Times: December 6, 1925

HENRY R. TAYLOR, CAPITALIST, DIES

Succumbs in Sleep From Heart

Disease in His City Home at 56 Years.

FATHER’S DEATH SIMILAR

He and His Brother Moses Each Inherited $15,000,000—A Director of Metropolitan Opera.

Henry Richmond Taylor, capitalist, a director of many corporations and a member of many clubs, was found dead in bed yesterday morning at his residence, 3 East Seventy-first Street. He was 56 years old. He returned home Friday night after dining at the Metropolitan Club and showed no signs of illness. He apparently succumbed to heart disease during his sleep. On another Saturday morning, that of May 28, 1921, his father, Henry A. Colt Taylor, died of heart disease in the same house.

A grandson of the late Moses Taylor, famous New York merchant and President of the National City Bank, Henry R. Taylor was born in this city and spent practically his entire life here. He graduated at Columbia In 1891. On the death of their father he and his brother. Moses Taylor, of Kean, Taylor & Co., 5 Nassau Street, each inherited a fortune or $15,000,000. Their sister, the Countess Harriet della Gherardesca of Florence, Italy, received $200,000 and a trust fund of $2.000,000.

Mr. Taylor was President of the Deer Range Corporation. which owns the 1,500 acres on Great South Bay, L. I., formerly the property of the late George C. Taylor, and now involved in a controversy between the corporation and the Long Island State Park Commission as to whether it shall be made into a public park.

Mr. Taylor was a director of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, Farmers Loan & Trust Company, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Rail-road, Seamen’s Bank for Savings, and other corporations. His clubs included the Knickerbocker, Union, Metropolitan.

New York Yacht, Brook, Racquet and Tennis, Turf and Field, India House, Piping Rock, National Golf, Downtown, Links. Links Golf, Garden City Golf, and Automobile of America.

In addition to his brother and sister, Mr. Taylor is survived by his step-mother, formerly Miss Josephine W. Johnson, with whom he resided. Funeral services will be held at 10 o’clock Tuesday morning in Grace Church, Broadway and Tenth Street.

Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical

“Within the covers of Sun and Shade…We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases,”—Ernest Edwards, president & publisher, 1889

In July, 1888, the first issue of Sun & Shade: A Photographic Record of Events, was published in New York City by The Photo-Gravure Company. Essentially a high-class art periodical, each issue featured eight or more beautiful hand-pulled photogravures as well as plates printed in photogelatine, (collotype) and halftone. These were collected within a stapled, folio-sized magazine issued monthly.  The subject matter included the work of leading amateur and professional photographers, as well as works of art—many from the galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The December issue—Christmas themed—featured a specially designed cover printed in green ink.  Success was swift. The first issue sold 1000 copies “in a fortnight”. (1.) Within the first year, Sun & Shade quickly increased circulation to 4000 copies a month. With a public demand for reprinting earlier issues, this success lead to a rebranding, after which, beginning with the September, 1889 issue, the magazine was renamed Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical. The final issue was March, 1896, when financial issues to the parent company, spurred by the eventual May, 1896 bankruptcy of the N.Y. Photo-Gravure Company, forced its closure.

Sun & Shade would become the ultimate statement of the many skills and inquisitive mind of Englishman Ernest Edwards. (1836-1903) Essentially his own printed passion project, the magazine was fueled by his ongoing love of photography in the field (issues featured many plates by him over the years) and a deeply scientific mind which pushed the advancement of the state of photo-mechanical reproduction and fine printing.

The son of a clergyman from Bloomsbury in London, he initially made a name for himself taking photographic portraits of eminent people in his Baker Street gallery. (Charles Darwin sat for him several times) His love of the outdoors also bore fruit and he became an accomplished alpine photographer. But his real interest centered around photo-mechanical reproduction. In 1869, he took out a patent in England for his own rudimentary collotype process called heliotype. In the Fall of 1872, he moved across the pond along with his wife Charlotte, and became superintendent of Boston’s Heliotype Printing Company after selling the American rights to American publisher James Ripley Osgood. (1836–1892) Edwards ran the Heliotype Printing Co. there until the end of 1884. The following year the James R. Osgood & Co. went bankrupt, although not a result of the heliotype division.

Growing restless in Boston, he then moved to New York City, where he established a new firm in March, 1885: The Photo-Gravure Company, (subsequently renamed The New York Photo-Gravure Company) with offices in Manhattan and a leased printing factory in Brooklyn. In 1887, his company received perhaps the one commission it’s best known for today: the printing of  781 collotypes, which Edwards called photogelatine plates, making up the monumental publication:

Animal Locomotion. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872-1885, with the landmark sequenced motion study photographs taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge. 

Restructured in 1891 as the New York Photogravure Co., Ernest Edwards continued to advance the state of photo-mechanical printing during his final decade, with Sun & Shade publishing some of the earliest examples of his own invention by 1894: plates printed in a three-color process called chrome-gelatine, a variation of his heliotype process.

Quality Rather than Quantity

Even though it survived less than eight years in print, describing Sun & Shade in Ernest Edward’s own words is perhaps the best posterity for this important photographic periodical with an artistic heart. One year after its’ debut, he wrote the following, published in The Photographic Times for August 2, 1889:

“A year ago we commenced the publication of our novel venture in journalism Sun and Shade, a Picture Periodical without letterpress, almost as an experiment, with a modest list of less than fifty subscribers. To-day we are printing an edition of 4,000 copies monthly. A sufficiently convincing proof of the wisdom of our hope that there was room for us.

“In our rapid growth the wish has been indicated unmistakably for the higher grade of pictures, and of the higher class–always for quality rather than quantity. Following rather than leading such a wish, we feel that we make no mistake in marking the future career of the magazine to be rather that of an artistic periodical than a photographic record of events.

*Our efforts shall be directed in the future to make Sun and Shade an artistic periodical which shall be not only pleasing but educational in its broadest sense, Some of our plans may be briefly referred to.

“We shall reproduce the leading pictures in the great collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Within the covers of Sun and Shade will be found from time to time, reproductions of the works of American artists. We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases, And we shall supplement these special features with examples of sculpture, architecture, and industrial art. If in the future we receive as hearty a response to our efforts as we have received in the past, our task will be indeed pleasant and our road to success a royal one.” (p. 394)

1. Notice: Sun & Shade: October, 1888. The August and September issues did not appear.