Alfred Rosling Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1802 - d. 1892

As soon as amateur photographers began organizing in the early 1850s, Alfred Rosling, a timber merchant in Reigate, became one of the most active and innovative. He was on the first council for the Photographic Society and, presumably because of his Quaker probity, was elected its first treasurer. For the 1852 Society of Arts exhibition in London Rosling submitted two dozen images, the majority made using paper negatives.

His biggest sensation in that pioneering exhibition was made by collodion, however, and consisted of microscopic reproductions of pages of the Illustrated London News that could only be read with a magnifying glass. In the 1854 Photographic Society exhibition in London his contributions were all calotypes, including five sets of pictures for the Wheatstone stereo viewer.

His buckle-process calotypes shown in the 1854 photographic exhibition at the Royal Institution in Liverpool were described in the Liverpool Photographic Journal as “exquisite.” Although Rosling continued to exhibit until 1860, his last calotypes were shown in the 1855-56 touring exhibition of the Society of Arts. Rosling’s daughter married the commercially successful photographer Francis Frith.