Felice Beato

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Felice Beato

Beato c. 1866

Born 1832

Venice, Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia

Died 29 January 1909 (aged c. 76)

Florence, Kingdom of Italy

Nationality British, Italian

Other names Felix Beato

Occupation Photographer

Known for One of the first people to take photographs in

East Asia and one of the first war
photographers

Relatives Antonio Beato (brother)

 Felice Beato (1832 – 29 January 1909), also known as Felix Beato,[note 1] was an Italian–
British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia
and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and
views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and
the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of
countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe
and North America. His work provides images of such events like the Indian Rebellion
of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body
of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan,
where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was
particularly deep and lasting.

Contents

 1Early life and identity

 2Mediterranean, the Crimea and India
 3China
o 3.1Taku Forts
o 3.2Summer Palace
 4Japan
 5Burma and later years
 6Death and legacy
 7Photographic techniques
 8See also
 9Footnotes
 10Citations
 11References
 12External links

Early life and identity[edit]

A death certificate discovered in 2009 shows that Beato was born in Venice in 1832 and
died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. The death certificate also indicates that he was
a British subject and a bachelor.[3][note 2] It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family
moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and so
Beato was a British subject.[3][4][note 3]
Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed "Felice Antonio Beato"
and "Felice A. Beato", it was long assumed that there was one photographer who
somehow photographed at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. In
1983 it was shown by Chantal Edel[6] that "Felice Antonio Beato" represented two
brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a
signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in
identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image.
Mediterranean, the Crimea and India[edit]
Little is certain about Felice Beato's early development as a photographer, though it is
said that he bought his first and only lens in Paris in 1851. [7] He probably met the British
photographer James Robertson in Malta in 1850 and accompanied him
to Constantinople in 1851. James Robertson became his brother-in-law in 1855.
Superintendent of the Imperial Mint, Robertson opened one of the first commercial
photography studios in the capital between 1854 and 1856. Robertson had been an
engraver at the Imperial Ottoman Mint since 1843 and had probably taken up
photography in the 1840s.[8] In 1853 the two began photographing together and they
formed a partnership called "Robertson & Beato" either in that year or in 1854, when
Robertson opened a photographic studio in Pera, Constantinople. Robertson and Beato
were joined by Beato's brother Antonio on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or
1856 and to Greece and Jerusalem in 1857. A number of the firm's photographs
produced in the 1850s are signed "Robertson, Beato and Co.", and it is believed that
the "and Co." refers to Antonio.[9]

The ruins of Sikandar Bagh palace showing the skeletal remains of rebels in the foreground,
Lucknow, India, 1858

In late 1854 or early 1855, James Robertson married Beato's sister, Leonilda Maria
Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine Grace (b. 1856), Edith Marcon
Vergence (b. 1859), and Helen Beatruc (b. 1861). [7]
In 1855 Felice Beato and Robertson travelled to Balaklava, Crimea, where they took
over reportage of the Crimean War following Roger Fenton's departure. Beato was
ostensibly Robertson's assistant,[10] however, the unpredictable conditions of a war-zone
forced Beato to assume a more active role. In contrast to Fenton's depiction of the
dignified aspects of war, Beato and Robertson showed the destruction and death.
[11]
 They photographed the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855, producing about 60
images.[12] Their Crimean images dramatically changed the way that war was reported
and depicted.[13]
In February 1858 Beato arrived in Calcutta and began travelling throughout Northern
India to document the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.[14][note 4] During this time
he produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses. [16] It is believed that
for at least one of his photographs taken at the palace of Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow he
had the skeletal remains of Indian rebels disinterred or rearranged to heighten the
photograph's dramatic impact[17] (see events at Taku Forts). He was also in the cities
of Delhi, Cawnpore, Meerut, Benares, Amritsar, Agra, Simla, and Lahore.[18] Beato was
joined in July 1858 by his brother Antonio, who later left India, probably for health
reasons, in December 1859. Antonio ended up in Egypt in 1860, setting up a
photographic studio in Thebes in 1862.[19]

China[edit]
In 1860 Beato left the partnership of Robertson & Beato, though Robertson retained use
of the name until 1867. Beato was sent from India to photograph the Anglo-French
military expedition to China in the Second Opium War. He arrived in Hong Kong in
March[20] and immediately began photographing the city and its surroundings as far
as Canton.[21] Beato's photographs are some of the earliest taken in China. [22]
While in Hong Kong, Beato met Charles Wirgman, an artist and correspondent for
the Illustrated London News. The two accompanied the Anglo-French forces travelling
north to Talien Bay, then to Pehtang and the Taku Forts at the mouth of the Peiho, and
on to Peking and Qingyi Yuan, the suburban Summer Palace.[21] For places on this route
and later in Japan, Wirgman's (and others') illustrations for the Illustrated London
News were often derived from Beato's photographs.[note 5]
Taku Forts[edit]
Interior of Fort Taku immediately after capture 21 August 1860

Beato's photographs of the Second Opium War are the first to document a military
campaign as it unfolded,[23] doing so through a sequence of dated and related images.
His photographs of the Taku Forts represent this approach on a reduced scale, forming
a narrative recreation of the battle. The sequence of images shows the approach to the
forts, the effects of bombardments on the exterior walls and fortifications, and finally the
devastation within the forts, including the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. [23] The
photographs were not taken in this order, as the photographs of dead Chinese had to
be taken first—before the bodies were removed; only then was Beato free to take the
other views of the exterior and interior of the forts. [24]
Dr. David F. Rennie, a member of the expedition, noted in his campaign memoir, "I
walked round the ramparts on the west side. They were thickly strewn with the dead, in
the northwest angle, thirteen were lying in one group around a gun. Signor Beato was
here in great excitement, characterising the group as 'beautiful,' and begging that it
might not be interfered with until perpetuated by his photographic apparatus, which was
done a few minutes afterwards."[25]
Summer Palace[edit]
Wenchang Pavilion aka. Wenchang Tower (文昌阁) of the Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan), before
being burnt down, October 1860

Just outside Peking, Beato took photographs at Qingyi Yuan (now Yihe Yuan, the
Summer Palace), a private estate of the Emperor of China comprising palace pavilions,
temples, a large artificial lake, and gardens. Some of these photographs, taken between
6 and 18 October 1860, are unique images of buildings that were plundered and looted
by the Anglo-French forces beginning on 6 October. On 18 and 19 October, the
buildings were torched by the British First Division on the orders of Lord Elgin as a
reprisal against the emperor for the torture and deaths of twenty members of an Allied
diplomatic party. Bennett writes that "These [photographs] appear to be the earliest
images of Peking so far discovered, and are of the utmost historical and cultural
importance."[26]
Among the last photographs that Beato took in China at this time were portraits of Lord
Elgin, in Peking to sign the Convention of Peking, and Prince Kung, who signed on
behalf of the Xianfeng Emperor.[23]
Beato returned to England in October 1861, and during that winter he sold 400 of his
photographs of India and China to Henry Hering, a London commercial portrait
photographer.[27]

Japan[edit]

Samurai of the Satsuma Clan, during the Boshin War period (1868–1869)

By 1863 Beato had moved to Yokohama, Japan, joining Charles Wirgman, with whom
he had travelled from Bombay to Hong Kong.[28] The two formed and maintained a
partnership called "Beato & Wirgman, Artists and Photographers" during the years
1864–1867,[29] one of the earliest[30] and most important[16] commercial studios in Japan.
Wirgman again produced illustrations derived from Beato's photographs, while Beato
photographed some of Wirgman's sketches and other works. (Beato's photographs
were also used for engravings within Aimé Humbert's Le Japon illustré[31] and other
works.) Beato's Japanese photographs include portraits, genre works, landscapes,
cityscapes, and a series of photographs documenting the scenery and sites along
the Tōkaidō Road, the latter series recalling the ukiyo-e of Hiroshige and Hokusai.
During this period, foreign access to (and within) the country was greatly restricted by
the Tokugawa shogunate. Accompanying ambassadorial delegations[32] and taking any
other opportunities created by his personal popularity and close relationship with the
British military, Beato reached areas of Japan where few westerners had ventured, and
in addition to conventionally pleasing subjects sought sensational and macabre subject
matter such as heads on display after decapitation. [33] His images are remarkable not
only for their quality but also for their rarity as photographic views of Edo period Japan.
[34]
The greater part of Beato's work in Japan contrasted strongly with his earlier work in
India and China, which "had underlined and even celebrated conflict and the triumph of
British imperial might".[35] Aside from the Portrait of Prince Kung, any appearances of
Chinese people in Beato's earlier work had been peripheral (minor, blurred, or both) or
as corpses. With the exception of his work in September 1864 as an official
photographer on the British military expedition to Shimonoseki,[28] Beato was eager to
portray Japanese people, and did so uncondescendingly, even showing them as defiant
in the face of the elevated status of westerners.[36]
Beato was very active while in Japan. In 1865 he produced a number of dated views
of Nagasaki and its surroundings.[28] From 1866 he was often caricatured in Japan
Punch, which was founded and edited by Wirgman.[37] In an October 1866 fire that
destroyed much of Yokohama, Beato lost his studio and many, perhaps all, of his
negatives.[28]
While Beato was the first photographer in Japan to sell albums of his works, he quickly
recognised their full commercial potential.[38] By around 1870 their sale had become the
mainstay of his business.[39] Although the customer would select the content of earlier
albums, Beato moved towards albums of his own selection. It was probably Beato who
introduced to photography in Japan the double concept of views and
costumes/manners, an approach common in photography of the Mediterranean. [40] By
1868 Beato had readied two volumes of photographs, "Native Types", containing 100
portraits and genre works, and "Views of Japan", containing 98 landscapes and
cityscapes.[41]
Many of the photographs in Beato's albums were hand-coloured, a technique that in his
studio successfully applied the refined skills of Japanese watercolourists and woodblock
printmakers to European photography.[34]
From about the time of the ending of his partnership with Wirgman in 1869, Beato
attempted to retire from the work of a photographer, instead, attempting other ventures [1]
[34]
 and delegating photographic work to others within his own studio in Yokohama, "F.
Beato & Co., Photographers",[42] which he ran with an assistant named H. Woollett and
four Japanese photographers and four Japanese artists. [43] Kusakabe Kimbei was
probably one of Beato's artist-assistants before becoming a photographer in his own
right.[44] These other ventures failed, but Beato's photographic skills and personal
popularity ensured that he could successfully return to work as a photographer. [1]
Beato photographed with Ueno Hikoma,[45] and possibly taught photography to Raimund
von Stillfried.[46]
Beato with Saigo Tsugumichi (both seated in front), with foreign friends. Photograph by Hugues
Krafft in 1882.

In 1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval

expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea.[37] Although it is possible that an unidentified
Frenchman photographed Korea during the 1866 invasion of Ganghwa Island,[47] Beato's
photographs are the earliest of Korea whose provenance is clear. [48]
Beato's business ventures in Japan were numerous. He owned land [49] and several
studios, was a property consultant, had a financial interest in the Grand Hotel of
Yokohama,[37] and was a dealer in imported carpets and women's bags, among other
things. He also appeared in court on several occasions, variously as plaintiff, defendant,
and witness.[50] On 6 August 1873 Beato was appointed Consul General for Greece in
Japan.[43]
In 1877 Beato sold most of his stock to the firm Stillfried & Andersen,[34] who then moved
into his studio. In turn, Stillfried & Andersen sold the stock to Adolfo Farsari in 1885.
[51]
 Following the sale to Stillfried & Andersen, Beato apparently retired for some years
from photography, concentrating on his parallel career as a financial speculator and
trader.[52] On 29 November 1884 he left Japan, ultimately landing in Port Said, Egypt.[53] It
was reported in a Japanese newspaper that he had lost all his money on the Yokohama
silver exchange.[54]

Burma and later years[edit]

Queen's Silver Pagoda, Mandalay, c. 1889

From 1884 to 1885 Beato was nominated as the official photographer of the Nile
Expedition led by Baron (later Viscount) G.J. Wolseley to Khartoum, Sudan, in relief
of General Charles Gordon.[54] Arriving in April 1885, however, he had missed the
unsuccessful relief mission by three months and had to turn his attention to
documenting the withdrawal of Wolseley's troops to the coastal town of Suakin.[55]
Briefly back in England in 1886, Beato lectured the London and Provincial Photographic
Society on photographic techniques.[54]
He arrived in Burma probably in December 1886, after Upper Burma had been annexed
by the British in late 1885. Much publicity had been made in the British press about the
three Anglo-Burmese Wars, which had started in 1825 and culminated in December
1885 with the fall of Mandalay and the capture of King Thibaw Min.
Beato, who had covered military operations in India and China, was probably attracted
by the news of the annexation. While he arrived in Burma after the main military
operations ended, he would still get to see more of the action, as the annexation by the
British led to an insurgency which lasted for the following decade. This allowed Beato to
take a number of pictures of the British military in operations or at the Royal Palace,
Mandalay, as well as insurgency soldiers and prisoners.
Beato set up a photographic studio in Mandalay and, in 1894, a curiosa and antiques
dealership, running both businesses separately and, according to records at the time,
very successfully.
His past experience and the credibility derived from his time in Japan brought him a
large clientele of opulent locals, posing in traditional attire for official portraits. Other
images, from Buddhas to landscapes and buildings, were sold from master albums in
Burma and Europe.
In 1896, Trench Gascoigne published some of Beato's images in Among Pagodas and
Fair Ladies and, the following year, Mrs Ernest Hart's Picturesque Burma included
more, while George W. Bird in his Wanderings in Burma not only presented thirty-five
credited photographs but published a long description of Beato's businesses and
recommended visitors to come by his shop.
By that time, Beato's photographs had come to represent the very image of Burma to
the rest of the world, which it would remain for decades to come.
As his curios business developed, with branches in Rangoon, Mandalay but also in
Colombo and London, he also acquired the Photographic Art Gallery in Mandalay in
1903, another photographic studio. In his old age, Beato had become an important
business party in Colonial Burma, involved in many enterprises from electric works to
life insurance and mining.

Death and legacy[edit]

Although Beato was previously believed to have died in Rangoon or Mandalay in 1905
or 1906,[56] his death certificate, discovered in 2009, indicates that he died on 29 January
1909 in Florence, Italy.
Whether acknowledged as his own work, sold as Stillfried & Andersen's, or encountered
as anonymous engravings, Beato's work had a major impact:
For over fifty years into the early twentieth century, Beato's photographs of Asia
constituted the standard imagery of travel diaries, illustrated newspapers, and other
published accounts, and thus helped shape "Western" notions of several Asian
societies.[57]

Photographic techniques[edit]
Photographs of the 19th century often now show the limitations of the technology used,
yet Beato managed to successfully work within and even transcend those limitations.
He predominantly produced albumen silver prints from wet collodion glass-
plate negatives.[58]
Beato pioneered and refined the techniques of hand-colouring photographs[32] and
making panoramas.[59] He may have started hand-colouring photographs at the
suggestion of Wirgman, or he may have seen the hand-coloured photographs made by
partners Charles Parker and William Parke Andrew.[60] Whatever the inspiration, Beato's
coloured landscapes are delicate and naturalistic and his coloured portraits, more
strongly coloured than the landscapes, are appraised as excellent. [note 6] As well as
providing views in colour, Beato worked to represent very large subjects in a way that
gave a sense of their vastness. Throughout his career, Beato's work is marked by
spectacular panoramas, which he produced by carefully making several contiguous
exposures of a scene and then joining the resulting prints together, thereby re-creating
the expansive view.[62] The complete version of his panorama of Pehtang comprises
seven photographs joined together almost seamlessly for a total length of more than 2
metres (6 1/2 ft).[62]

Panorama of Yedo from Atagoyama: a panorama (comprising five albumen prints) of Edo (now
Tokyo), showing daimyō residences, 1865 or 1866

See also[edit]
 History of photography 1850-1900

 Felice...Felice..., a 1998 Dutch drama loosely based on Beato's time in Japan

 Sakoku
 List of Westerners who visited Japan before 1868
 Felice A. Beato
 Baron Raimund von Stillfried
 John McCosh, 19th-century photographer in Burma
 Philip Adolphe Klier, 19th-century photographer in Burma
 List of Orientalist artists
 Orientalism

Footnotes[edit]
 1. ^ It appears that Felice was his original name. However, he much preferred Felix.
[1]
 During his lifetime he was often referred to in print as "Signor Beato", and his surname
was often misspelt ("Beat", "Beatto", etc).[2]
2. ^ Recent scholarship had uncovered an application by Beato for a travel permit in 1858
that included information suggesting he was born in 1833 or 1834 on the island of Corfu.
[4]

3. ^ Beato has long been described as British, Italian, Corfiot Italian, and/or Greek. The
movements of his family and of early nineteenth-century history in the Adriatic mean
that he can justifiably be described by all these terms. Corfu was on and off part of
Venetian territory from 1386 until 1815, when the Treaty of Paris placed it and the other
Ionian Islands under British protection. Corfu was ceded to Greece in 1864. A line of the
Beato family is recorded as having moved to Corfu in the 17th century and was one of
the noble Venetian families that ruled the island during the Republic of Venice.[5]
4. ^ Gernsheim states that Beato and Robertson both travelled to India in 1857, but it is
now generally accepted that Beato travelled there alone.[15]
5. ^ For an anthology of the illustrations (as well as the texts, although in Japanese
translation only) of the Illustrated London News' Japanese material, see Kanai.
6. ^ Bennett quotes and summarises collector Henry Rosin's appraisal of Beato's hand-
coloured photographs.[61]

Citations[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Bennett, Photography in Japan, p. 86.
2. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, passim.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b Bennett, History of Photography in China, 1842–1860, p. 241.
4. ^ Jump up to:a b Dobson, "'I been to keep up my position'", p. 31.
5. ^ Gray, p. 68.
6. ^ Zannier, Antonio e Felice Beato, n.p.
7. ^ Jump up to:a b Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 90.
8. ^ Broecker, p. 58; Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 89, 90.
9. ^ Pare, Photography and Architecture, p. 245 (citing Vaczek and Buckland, p. 190);
Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 90–91.
10. ^ Hannavy, J., Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Routledge, 2013, p.
128
11. ^ Greenough, p. 21; Pare, "Roger Fenton", p. 226.
12. ^ Broecker, p. 58.
13. ^ Gartlan, L., "James Robertson and Felice Beato in the Crimea: Recent
findings," History of Photography, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2005, pp72-80
14. ^ Harris, p. 23; Dehejia, p. 121; Masselos and Gupta, p. 1.
15. ^ Gernsheim, p. 96.
16. ^ Jump up to:a b Zannier, "Beato", p. 447.
17. ^ Gartlan, "Felice Beato", p. 128.
18. ^ Harris, p. 23; Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 91–92.
19. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 90, 91.
20. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 92.
21. ^ Jump up to:a b Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 92–93.
22. ^ Rosenblum, p. 124.
23. ^ Jump up to:a b c Lacoste, p. 10.
24. ^ Harris.
25. ^ Quoted in "Felice Beato" (Luminous Lint).
26. ^ Bennett, "China", pp. 292–295.
27. ^ Lacoste, pp. 11, 184.
28. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Bennett, Photography in Japan, 1853–1912, p. 94.
29. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 97; Clark, "A Chronology of Charles Wirgman (1832?–
1891)", p. 35.
30. ^ Dobson, "Japan", p. 770.
31. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 96, 98, 100; Hockley, pp. 77–80.
32. ^ Jump up to:a b Gartlan, "Felix Beato", p. 129.
33. ^ Handy, p. 57.
34. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Bennett, Photography in Japan, 1853–1912, p. 97.
35. ^ Dobson, "'I been to keep up my position'", p. 32.
36. ^ Dobson, "'I been to keep up my position'", passim.
37. ^ Jump up to:a b c Bennett, Photography in Japan, 1853–1912, p. 95.
38. ^ Hockley, p. 67.
39. ^ Hockley, p. 68.
40. ^ Hockley, p. 72.
41. ^ Beato, Felice (2006). F.ベアト写真集 1（Photo Album, in Japanese but with some
English subtitles, from the Yokohama Archives of History）. ISBN 978-4-7503-2369-5.
42. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 100.
43. ^ Jump up to:a b Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 103.
44. ^ Bakumatsu Nihon no fūkei to hitobito: Ferikkusu Beato shashinshū, p. 186.
45. ^ Himeno, p. 24.
46. ^ Gartlan, A Chronology of Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1839–1911), p. 130.
47. ^ Choi and Park; Bennett, "Korea", p. 805.
48. ^ Bennett, "Korea", p. 805.
49. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 99, 100, 108.
50. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 104–109, passim.
51. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 107.
52. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 107–108.
53. ^ Clark, Fraser, and Osman, pp. 111–112.
54. ^ Jump up to:a b c Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 112.
55. ^ Lacoste, p. 22
56. ^ Robinson, p. 41; Clark, Fraser, and Osman, p. 116; Zannier, "Beato", p. 446.
57. ^ Gartlan, "Felix Beato", p. 131.
58. ^ Lacoste, pp. 24–25.
59. ^ Gartlan, "Felix Beato", p. 130.
60. ^ Bennett, Early Japanese Images, p. 39.
61. ^ Bennett, Early Japanese Images, p. 43; Robinson, p. 48.
62. ^ Jump up to:a b Lacoste, pp. 8–9.