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Photograph
Skidmore, Francis Alexander - Enlarge image
Photograph
- Place of origin:
Coventry, England (made)
- Date:
1865-1870 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Skidmore, Francis Alexander (the younger), born 1817 - died 1896 (maker)
- Materials and Techniques:
Albumen print on paper
- Credit Line:
Purchased with the assistance of the Friends of the National Libraries
- Museum number:
E.416-2006
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C, case MB2E, shelf SH63, box M80
Albumen print, a type of photograph, dating to the 1860s-1870s, is of an ironwork fitting for a door and is the work of Skidmore Art Maufactures and Constructive Iron Company, Coventry. The photograph is thus a record of the work done and comes from an archive of designs and photographs from the firm.
Francis Skidmore (1817-1896) was a leading Victorian metalworker in the Gothic Revival style, which was an architectural movement the nineteenth-century practitioners of which sought to revive medieval forms. The ironwork scroll decoration for a door which is no.24 in the pattern book from Skidmore's Art Manufactures Company (Public Library, Coventry) has the same palmette at the centre top of the branches as that in this photograph. Skidmore expressed his admiration for the medieval ironwork on a door at Merton College, Oxford in a letter to the Oxford Archaeological Society Journal. This ironwork decoration and the one in the pattern book seem have partly influenced by this medieval source.
