At their third photographica sale on
April 23, the earliest piece of equipment was this J.J. Atkinson 1850s brass lens board, right.The 25 lenses would permit a multiple exposure of 450 images on a single plate, but the auctioneers could find no reference to a British camera with this capability, even though Atkinson was a Liverpool maker.
Auctioneer Daniel Goddard thinks it possible that Atkinson was supplied by a Frenchman, Dagron, who made the all-brass 25 lens Microphotographic, camera during the 1850s. Estimated at £1000-2000, the lens board sold to a collector at £3300.
Top price of the sale went to an 1860/70s album of 84 albumen prints of the Orient which sold at £6800. The album contained unrecorded images and four
panoramas of Hong Kong and Macau worth several hundred pounds each. Elsewhere a Stroud and Rendell lantern of ‘Universal and Scientific’ type fetched £2600 and a Biunial magic lantern sold at £2300.
At the lower end there were some startling images, including a ‘carte-de-visite’ of beheaded Greek bandits, dated 1870, which made £200, and another of the Wild West gang, the Younger Brothers, who
rode with Jesse James to the infamous Northfield robbery in 1876, which sold at just £30.
25 lenses put Exeter in the world picture
Major photograph sales are usually confined to London and New York salerooms, but since selling the Earl Craven family archive of daguerreotypes last year Bearne’s of Exeter (buyer’s premium 15 per cent) are now on the international circuit.
