Frederick William Flower

Frederick William Flower (22 February 1815 – 18 July 1889) was a Scottish-Portuguese photographer. He is considered one of the pioneers of photography in Portugal. Most of his photographs from between 1849 and 1859 have been well-preserved.

History Frederick Flower was born on 22 February 1815 in Leith, Scotland, where his father had been sent to work. At an early age his parents moved back to England, living in Hull. It was from there that he sailed to Porto in 1834, where he took up a position with the Port wine exporters, Smith Woodhouse & Company. He stayed at the home of the owner of the company, Robert Woodhouse, as was customary for young Englishmen moving to Portugal to work in the wine trade. Following the death of his father, he was joined in Portugal in 1836 by his mother, brother and two younger sisters.

It is not known exactly when Flower took up photography or from where he obtained the necessary expertise. He was one of the first people in Portugal to use the salted paper and calotype processes developed by Henry Fox Talbot in England from the late 1830s. He may have learned of the calotype process from Joseph James Forrester, famous for mapping the Douro river, who took up amateur photography around 1853, although information was first made available in the Revista Literária published in Porto. Flower made most of his calotypes between 1853 and 1858. He was also the Portuguese pioneer of the use of strip photography. For more than a century, Flower's direct descendants ensured the conservation of his photographs before donating them to the National Photography Archive of the General-Directorate of Cultural Heritage of Portugal. In 1928, his grandson, Harold M. Flower, commissioned new prints obtained from the calotypes and toured the north of Portugal to try to identify the places photographed by his grandfather. The family had carefully preserved the photographs, also collecting historical memories about its author. Although the Flower family remained an Anglo-Portuguese family, they never transferred the photographs to England. Whenever a member of the family returned to England, he or she deposited the collection with another family member who remained in Portugal. The calotype negatives have mainly survived in good condition, but some of the prints have not. An examination of the collection shows strong evidence of Flower's technical skills and mastery of photographic techniques as well as deliberate attempts to experiment.