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Ten early photographs of Athens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

R. A. Tomlinson
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham

Abstract

These photographs of Athens are included in a collection made by Field Marshal Sir John Lintorn Simmons, RE. From internal evidence they appear to date to 1853. They include evidence for the Acropolis and its monuments at that date, as well as a general view of Athens and Lykabettos, the temple of Olympian Zeus, and the choregic monument of Lysicrates (along with the ruins of the Capuchin monastery).

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1992

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References

1 I am most grateful to the Librarian, Maj. J. T. Hancock, and his assistant, Mrs M. Magnuson, for allowing me to see these photographs and for letting me have negative copies of them, from which my photographer Graham Norrie made the prints used for the plates accompanying this article. Mrs Magnuson also kindly sent me a photocopy of Sir John Lintorn Simmons's obituary. Special abbreviation: ‘Benaki Catalogue’ = Athens 1839–1900: A Photographic Record (Athens: Benaki Museum, 1985).

2 The inscription in the album says Sir John was Mrs Lintorn-Orman's brother. As Sir John (b.1821) was a fifth son, it is perhaps safer to identify the donor (who was still alive in 1932) as Sir John's daughter Mrs Orman, in whose house (the obituary states) he died in 1903.

3 Obituary notice of Field Marshal Sir J. Lintorn A. Simmons, GCB, GCMG, in Royal Engineers' Journal, 1 Sept. 1903, 202.

4 Edwards, G., ‘Photographs of Greece in the Musée d'Orsay's album of the duc de Chartres’, History of Photography, 134 (1990), 165–79, fig. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also illustrated in Benaki Catalogue, no. 47.

5 Tomlinson, R. A., The Athens of Alma Tadema (Stroud, 1991)Google Scholar; id., ‘The Acropolis of Athens in the 1870s’, BSA 82 (1987) 297–304.

6 I give the titles of the photographs written in the album. Where no title exists, I give my own title in square brackets.

7 Benaki Catalogue, no. 29.

8 For this and other buildings in Athens at this date, see Michaili, L., Plaka (Athens, n.d., 1986?).Google Scholar

9 Benaki Catalogue, no.57.

10 Benaki Catalogue, no.54.

11 Benaki Catalogue, no.67.

12 Michaili (n. 8).

13 Benaki Catalogue, no. 13.

14 See BCH 80 (1956), pls. 11–24.

15 Benaki Catalogue, no.36.

16 Tomlinson, Athens of Alma Tadema (n. 5).

17 Benaki Catalogue, no. 47.

18 Edwards (n. 4).

19 Edwards (n. 4). figs. 3–4.

20 Ibid., fig. 6.

21 Ibid., fig. 12.

22 e.g. The View of the Tower of the Winds and the Acropolis by James Stuart, now in the RIBA Collections; Lever, J. and Richardson, M., The Art of the Architect (London, 1984), 58–9.Google Scholar

23 Benaki Catalogue, no. 67, there dated 1858–62.