Henry Collen

Henry Collen (9 October 1797, Middlesex – 8 May 1879, Brighton) was an English miniature portrait painter to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and the Duchess of Kent.

In fact, in her letters, Ellen states that she met Henry at the home of John Hayter, Sir George's younger brother, also a prolific painter.

[citation needed] In the eighteen-thirties, Henry Collen was personally acquainted with young Princess Victoria, being her drawing teacher and her miniature portrait painter ... For her fourteenth birthday on 24 May 1833 Victoria received a 'little painting for my album' from Collen, and on at least two occasions she sat for her portrait by him.

[3]: 145–150 Henry Collen made a fairly moderate living as a portrait painter in London in the mid-19th century.

[4] One of the four Henry Collen portraits was of a John Avery titled "Surgeon", which is a watercolour miniature on ivory, being only 8" × 53⁄4".

At Windsor Castle are several miniatures by Collen, including portraits of the Duchess of Kent (1829) and Lady Catherine Vernon Harcourt (1838).

× 27/8 in., signed in front with a scratched signature "H Collen 1840" (the H and C not forming a monogram) and inscribed at the back "1840/painted by Henry Collen/Miniature Painter to/ The Queen and H.R.H.

Henry Collen worked in the company of many respected artists in mid-19th century London, as well as important scientists of his day.

Besides being close to the Hayter family, who were already established artists, Henry and Ellen were also close friends of Edwin Landseer, the well-known painter of animals and pastoral English landscapes as well as the designer of the four bronze lions at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London.

(Schaaf) Calotype was an early photographic process developed by Henry Fox Talbot who was a colleague of Collen's.

The landscapes of Roger Fenton and Francis Frith, and the portraiture of Antoine Claudet and Henry Collen .

[7][8] Ronalds went on to build and describe various different photo-recording machines in a series of reports and papers, which were employed in observatories around the world until well into the 20th century.

In the late 1970s, Larry Schaaf wrote about the contributions of Henry Collen to the field of photography in its early stages in London in the 19th century.

The information on the following pages comes from Mr. Schaaf's article titled, "Henry Collen and the Treaty of Nanking," which appeared in The History of Photography, an international quarterly, October 1982.

It also ceded the island of Hong Kong to England and was of great commercial and psychological importance to the British Empire.

Daguerre's method had the "ability to record the fine detail" but would have supplied "only a small metal plate as a facsimile of the rice paper."

As miniature-painter to the Queen, he would have been in a position to discuss such a project with the proper people..." On Christmas Day, Collen produced at least two photographic copies of the original 4-foot-long (1.2 m) document handwritten in ink.

It seems that the original treaty was brought to London for the Queen's signature after Collen made the copy.

At the last minute, it was decided that an extra copy should be made to hang at Buckingham Palace, which is why Collen was working on it on Christmas Day.

(see photo) Mr. Wood's article deciphers the long journey of this copy and the location of the original Chinese document.

It seems that when in the very last few days of June in 1997, as Hong Kong was passed back to the People's Republic of China, a(n)....announcement was made to reveal that Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist forces had secretly taken the original Treaty of Nanking when they retreated to Taiwan from China in 1949.

(Wood) Meanwhile, in 1952, the George Eastman House was offered for purchase one of Henry Collen's copies from a dealer of rare books in California.

Schaaf also states that Talbot for some reason did not share all of his expertise with Collen, and at some point Henry's lack of scientific know-how limited his ability to experiment further.

In spite of an unfortunately shortened photographic career, Henry Collen is mentioned and published in various journals of photography and science (see appendix).