[Friedrich Wilhelm] Ludwig IV Karl, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt (1837-1892), Queen Victoria’s son-in-law and the great-great-grandfather of King Charles III.
CDV by Silvy, stamped at Silvy’s Crystal Palace stall.
George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon (1800-1870), British Foreign Secretary 1853-58, 1865-66, and 1868-70, and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who tried and failed to rouse British support for the Irish during the famine years.
CDV by Camille Silvy, with a stamp from Silvy’s stall at the Crystal Palace.
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.
