Pioneering 19th-Century West Sussex Photos Could Achieve £70,000 In Auction

“A collection of historical importance for the nation and a rare slice of social history.”

That's how auctioneers are describing the unique and pioneering photographic images you see here, produced by 19th century Horsham polymath Captain Thomas Honywood (1819–1888).

Under the hammer in October will be a collection of his images of Horsham, as well as of buildings and the surrounding Surrey and Sussex landscapes and personalities.

These are said to be among the earliest photographs in existence of southern England, and it's also claimed they're the first photographic images of Horsham.

According to Chiswick Auctions, where the sale is set to take place, the album of 170 images might fetch as much as £70,000.

Above is the pub today known as the Queen's Head, but seen as Capt. Honywood caught it in the 1850s, probably with his Horsham Volunteer Fire Brigade outside, accompanied by a brass band and a collection of supporters and onlookers.

In the present-day image, from Google Street View, it is clear that the framework for the pub sign, and some of the diamond-shaped chimney pots, have survived to the modern era.

But this single image is barely scratching the surface of the variety in this album, containing high-quality photographs of people and scenes representing an era that has passed out of living memory.

Austin Farahar supervises photographic materials at Chiswick Auctions (his title being "Head of Photographica").

He said, of the album:

“Many of the works contained within are simply breath-taking.

"The album’s contents, containing personal portraiture studies of the people and the places that he knew and loved dearly, communicate with such arresting intimacy a record of the world that Honywood inhabited.

"Before these photographs were discovered, every record or account of this part of England had been translated via the eyes and hands of an artist, perhaps with the assistance of the camera-lucida, but still from the subjective view of a draftsman.

"What we have here is a beautiful and extraordinary intersection of art and science.

"William Henry Fox Talbot had developed and patented his Calotype process (from the Greek Kalos, meaning beautiful), just a decade before.

"Very few people were proficient in this process and fewer excelled with such artistic flair in the way that Honywood did.”

The auction is due to take place on October 28.

Captain Thomas Honywood

Honywood is notable for taking the earliest photographs of Southern England in existence.

He is also responsible for the invention of the photographic technique known as Nature Printing.

As well as his photographic skills, Honywood was also a skilled scientist and archaeologist, famously discovering the ‘Horsham Hoard’ of medieval pottery during one of his many excavations in his beloved West Sussex.

He was reportedly very involved in his local community, which also no doubt enabled him to capture events and people first-hand.

He was Captain of the Horsham Volunteer Fire Brigade for many years and assisted neighbouring towns and villages in starting their own Fire Services, which earned him an oil portrait of himself, which now hangs in Horsham Museum. 

Honywood’s passion and skill in photography led to much experimentation with a range of photo-chemical processes, which resulted in him devising a new technique called ‘Nature Printing’, which enables the transfer of positive images onto a range of surfaces.

He was able to patent this technique and exhibited it at the London International Inventions Exhibition of 1885, which was received with both awe and commendation.

(Biographical information and all images supplied by Chiswick Auctions)