Edouard Manet

David Wilkie Wynfield was the son of an Indian Army officer and a great nephew of David Wilkie RA, one of Scotland’s most celebrated artists. Although he painted historical and literary subjects throughout his life, Wynfield is now best known for his striking photographic portraits of fellow artists, produced during the 1860s – like this one of French painter Edouard Manet.

Wynfield’s sitters were predominantly artists and architects (many members of the Royal Academy), including some of the most prominent artists of the day such as Edouard Manet, John Everett Millais RA and Lord Frederic Leighton PRA. Many figures wore fancy dress mimicking the appearance of Old Masters: Millais as Dante, Sir Edward Burne-Jones Bt ARA as Holbein and T.O. Barlow RA as a Rembrandt self-portrait. The portraits draw allusions between Wynfield’s contemporaries and their illustrious predecessors. However, the portraits of Manet and Holman Hunt suggest he later abandoned the use of costume.

Wynfield eschewed the conventions of mainstream Victorian photography. His innovative portraits made use of painterly and experimental techniques including close-up views, soft focus and strong contrasts of light and shade. He used long exposures so that subtle movements from the sitter were picked up by the camera. Areas of light and dark in the background were carefully placed to contrast with the different tones of the figure: white behind dark areas of hair and dress and dark grey or black to contrast with the white profiles.

Curator Juliet Hacking wrote that there is a tragic element to Wynfield’s portraits, since “the technical advances of the nineteenth century which increased at an accelerated rate man’s knowledge of his world also stressed the insignificance of human life and endeavour in the face of the unceasing cycles of evolution and decay. By making reference to a previous age of transition Wynfield’s portrait series highlights the psychological dilemmas engendered both by the condition of the Victoria age and by the artist’s own condition: the transition from youth to maturity, non-comformity to conformity, faith to reason.”

There are seventy two prints of Wynfield’s photographs in the Academy’s Collection, all of which were presented to the Academy by William Yeames RA, Wynfield’s brother-in-law, when he retired from the post of Librarian in 1911.