Alice Hughes

Alice Mary Hughes ( born August 3, 1857 in Notting Hill, (Kensington ), London, † April 4, 1939 in Worthing, West Sussex ) was a British socialite photographer.

Life

Alice Hughes was the youngest of three children of the portraitist Edward Hughes and his first wife Mary Ann Sherratt. When Alice was seven years old, her mother died. Two years later, her father married his second wife Kate Margetts. As well as these died, the father of Alice ordered as his only remaining living child - the two older siblings, meanwhile, were also deceased - from her boarding school in Brussels back home to perform for him the budget and to do the paperwork of his business.

Alice later studied photography at the Polytechnic School of Photography; initially only to document the exclusive Portätgemälde her father photographically to. In 1891, however, she opened a photo studio in Gower Street in Bloomsbury. As the first gentlewoman professional photographer photographed many members of the British royal family, such as Queen Alexandra or their daughter Louise and her two children Maud and Alexandra. Later, Hughes also portrayed Queen Mary. At the height of her fame the mid-1890s she was the leading society photographer in London and employed sixty female employees. Around the turn of the century they had almost a monopoly on the picture for the cover of the magazine Country Life.

In December 1910, she sold her business, together with a stock of 50,000 negatives to its competitors Speaight & Son Ltd.. and went in 1914 to Berlin to open a new studio. Surprised by the outbreak of the First World War, she returned to London in 1915 and opened another studio in Ebury Street in Westminster, which she ran until her retirement in 1933.

Hughes worked with Platinotype and photographed the careful toilet, with big hats and fancy dress, in the style of a portrait painter, Reynolds and Gainsborough. She specialized in the graceful posturing of women and mother - and -child groups; Men portrayed only rarely.