Philip Hermogenes Calderon

Inscriptionback to top

On mount below print, photographic facsimile of sitter’s autograph.

This portraitback to top

This image was registered by Wynfield for copyright on 8 December 1863, when it was described as ‘Photograph of P.H. Calderon in Vandyck costume, bust, nearly full face’. [1] It was published in March 1864 in Part 1 (‘After the Flemish and Dutch Schools’) of The Studio: A Collection of Photographic Portraits of Living Artists, taken in the style of the Old Masters, by an Amateur. ‘Quels grands seigneurs!’ remarked George du Maurier of the group. [2]

Calderon wears a pale doublet with horizontal stripes under a darker silk garment and a spreading white ruff similar to that seen in Wynfield’s photograph of J.E. Hodgson (NPG P74). The large pleated ruff is typical of those shown in early seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture and may be compared with Van Dyck’s 1624 portrait of Prince Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy (Dulwich Picture Gall.), while the image overall also evokes the Spanish school with which Calderon was ancestrally connected.

From the early 1860s, alongside Wynfield, Henry Stacy Marks, George Adolphus Storey and others, Calderon was a central figure in the St John’s Wood Clique of artists who met weekly for sketching, mutual criticism and sociability. [3] In summer 1866 Calderon and Wynfield, together with W.F. Yeames, rented Hever Castle, once the residence of Anne Boleyn, which furnished backgrounds for depictions of medieval scenes.

Additional prints of this image are in the Royal Academy of Arts, London (03/5835); Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1978P419); the Royal Photographic Society, Bath (1996p); and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (134-1945).

See NPG collection P70–P100

Dr Jan Marsh

Footnotesback to top

1) Reg. for copyright 1863 Dec 8: National Archives (COPY 1/5).
2) Letter from G. du Maurier to Thomas Armstrong, Feb. 1684; see Du Maurier 1951, p.228.
3) Hillier 1964.

Physical descriptionback to top

Quarter-length, to front, wearing historical costume including a wide pleated ruff.

Provenanceback to top

Sir Edmund Gosse, from whose heirs purchased 1929.

Exhibitionsback to top

Princes of Victorian Bohemia: Photographs by David Wilkie Wynfield, NPG, London, 2000 (2).

Reproductionsback to top

Hacking 2000, no.2.

View all known portraits for Philip Hermogenes Calderon

View all known portraits for David Wilkie Wynfield