Money Collection: Album of views of Lucknow. Photographer(s): Beato, Felice.

Mock snake-skin covered album, 242x335mm, containing prints attached with corner mounts. The majority of prints have captions handwritten in white ink on the page and there is also a brief history of the album inside the front cover:. 'The prints of the contemporary photos were taken from the original full-plate negatives in the possession of Mr Botting, President of the Lucknow Trust. He found them on a stall in the Bazaar. They were taken by the King of Oudh's Italian photographer. I took the others from as near as I could locate the place from which the originals had been taken. I used VPK Exakta Tenar f.22 & Tele Mega f.55. The latter lens reproduced the perspective of the long focus lens in the original camera. I made a complete photo-survey of the Residency in the hot weather 1939 in anticipation of Dominion status. A readable account is 'Ordeal at Lucknow' (Michael Joyce)'. The photographs are views of mutiny sites in Lucknow taken in 1939 compared with copy prints of Beato's 1858 views which the author alleges are taken from original full-plate negatives purchased in a Lucknow bazaar in the 1930s (see also correspondence accompanying the album). This explanation seem unlikely as Beato's negatives would have been returned to London for printing after they were advertised for sale by H. Hering. Also the prints in this album cannot have been made from original negatives as they are too small compared with other Beato prints in the OIOC collection. However, some of the copy prints are numbered in the negative and these numbers appear to correspond to the numbers in Hering's list, eg. Print 51 is numbered 'L29' and is a copy of Beato's view of the Chattar Manzil and King's boat which is number 29 in the series of Lucknow views listed by Hering (ie. L29 = Lucknow 29). A possible explanation is that the negatives purchased in Lucknow were copy negatives made in, or sent to, India for commercial use. (See also the Dannenberg album at Photo 254 for comparison).

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