Unidentified sitter

Photographed by Robert Bingham of Paris.

From the website of the National Portrait Gallery: 'Born in 1825 near Leicester in England, Bingham had a background in chemistry. He was particularly interested in photographic processes, and published a treatise on this subject in 1848. He later became the first writer to outline the possible use of collodion in photographs and the self-proclaimed 'Inventeur du procédé collodion'. Bingham first exhibited his photographs of landscapes and of copies of paintings in London at The Great Exhibition in 1851. In 1859 he established a photographic portrait studio in Paris, which thrived throughout the 1860s and continued under his name even after his death in Brussels in 1870. '