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Waynflete Henry Patten-Saunders (William Henry Saunders, 1832-1899), a self-made man, who granted himself a pedigree and a backstory wholly at odds with his early life; his later life featured bigamy, a thrilling novel, and success as a dog breeder.

This carte de visite was taken by Camille-Léon-Louis Silvy (1834-1910) on 27 February 1862; it appears in Silvy’s office records as sitting 7099. Silvy, a native of Nogent-le-Rotrou (Eure et Loir), moved to London in the 1850s and opened a studio at 38 Porchester Terrace in Bayswater. His career lasted little more than a decade, a period in which he managed 17,000 sittings; his later life, in and out of hospitals and convinced he had poisoned himself in the darkroom, was a sad one.