Picture credit: © 2011 Jonathan Mitchell | ScotFoto.co.uk
Photographs by one of Amateur Photographer?s earliest readers, who won a medal from AP in 1885, go under the hammer in Edinburgh later today.
Andrew Begbie Ovenstone was a late Scottish Victorian photographer (1851-1935) from East Renfrewshire.
A lot containing a collection of his photographic albums includes a Silver Medal awarded to him a year after Amateur Photographer was first published in October 1884, according to auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull.
The medal was awarded for Ovenstone’s photograph entitled ?At the pool?, which is among the images on sale.
The auctioneers estimate that the lot will sell for between £10,000-£15,000.
Picture credits: © 2011 Jonathan Mitchell | ScotFoto.co.uk
The Glasgow-based amateur worked in the shipping industry most of his life, for a firm called Handyside & Henderson and Anchor Line.
In his spare time he travelled throughout Scotland and built up a modest, yet high quality, archive of albumen prints with a wide variety of subject matter.
This included portraits of fishermen, scenes of rural life, portraits of friends and family and some landscapes.
The photographer’s interest in things maritime is also reflected in his work, mostly taken in the decade between 1880 to 1890, with several of the scenes in the albums for sale showing yachting on the Clyde, fishermen at work and merchant navy ships.
Ovenstone had a knack for judging light, composition and tones and his photographs, while amateur, could be compared with other great late Victorian photographers.
The auction includes three other medals awarded to him from the Glasgow & West Coast Photographic Association, a slide box, a stereoscopic viewer, around 120 plate negatives and several albums (which include the picture ‘At the pool’).
Jonathan Mitchell
Picture credits: © 2011 Jonathan Mitchell | ScotFoto.co.uk
