Philip Hermogenes Calderon
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© National Portrait Gallery, London
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Philip Hermogenes Calderon
by David Wilkie Wynfield
Albumen print, 1863
7 7/8 in. x 6 3/8 in. (200 mm x 162 mm)
NPG P72
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.
Exhibitionsback to top
Princes of Victorian Bohemia: Photographs by David Wilkie Wynfield, NPG, London, 2000 (2).
View all known portraits for Philip Hermogenes Calderon
View all known portraits for David Wilkie Wynfield