36 OF 94 
Thomas Carlyle
36 of 94 portraits of Thomas Carlyle
© National Portrait Gallery, London
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Thomas Carlyle
by Elliott & Fry
albumen print, circa 1865
8 in. x 5 3/4 in. (202 mm x 146 mm)
Given by Christopher Geoffrey Woolner, 1975
Photographs Collection
NPG x5661
Sitterback to top
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Historian and essayist; Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. Sitter associated with 94 portraits.
Artistback to top
- Elliott & Fry (active 1863-1962), Photographers. Artist or producer associated with 10998 portraits.
Linked publicationsback to top
- Rogers, Malcolm, Camera Portraits, 1989 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 October 1989 - 21 January 1990), p. 79 Read entry
The son of a mason from Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, the essayist and historian Carlyle, supported by his forceful wife, went on to become a figure of towering intellectual authority, 'the sage of Chelsea', so like one of those great men, the 'heroes', whom he revealed in his writings as the makers of history. Handsome and intense, he was painted, sculpted and photographed almost more than any other non-royal figure in the nineteenth century. He seems to have taken pains about his own portraits, just as he was anxious to acquire portraits of anyone he was writing about. One of the earliest Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, he wrote: 'often have I found a portrait superior in real instruction to half a dozen written biographies … or, rather let me say, I have found that the portrait was as a small lighted candle, by which the biographies could for the first time be read'.
The firm of Elliott & Fry (Joseph John Elliott and Clarence Edmund Fry) was based at 55 Baker Street, London, and remained there until the 1960s. Carlyle sat to them at about the time of the completion of his biography of Frederick the Great (1865), shortly before the death of his wife.
Placesback to top
- Place made: United Kingdom: England, London (photographers' studio, 55 Baker Street, Portman Square, London)
Events of 1865back to top
Current affairs
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is the first female to be awarded a doctor's licence. She is also involved in collecting signatures for the Manchester Suffrage Committee, the first suffrage organisation, formed this year. John Stuart Mill was also elected to parliament this year on the platform of women's suffrage.Palmerston dies in October, and is replaced as leader of the Liberal government by his Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell.
Art and science
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is published, inspired by Carroll's relationship (as Oxford don Charles Dodgson) with his friend Henry George Liddell's daughter Alice.Matthew Arnold publishes the first series of Essays in Criticism, a defining text in the development of English literature as an academic discipline.
International
In the American civil war, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, leading to the surrender of the Confederacy's remaining field armies. A few days later, US President Abraham Lincoln is shot dead by Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth. Later this year slavery is officially abolished after years of fierce campaigning. In response, the first branch of the Ku Klux Klan is founded on Christmas Eve.Comments back to top
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