Walter Stoneman

Walter Ernest Stoneman (6 April 1876 – 14 May 1958) was an English portrait photographer who is known for taking photographs for the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London.

Career as a photographer Stoneman was born in Plymouth, Devon, on 6 April 1876, the second youngest of fourteen children of Edwin Stoneman, who ran a wholesale grocer's business. He went to school at Plymouth College, which he left when he was fifteen to embark on a career as a photographer. He later had his own photographic business in Plymouth, Heath and Stoneman Ltd., but most of his career was spent working for the London firm of J. Russell & Sons, which he had joined as a junior photographer by 1897.

In June 1897, he was the only one of fourteen photographers working for J. Russell & Sons who succeeded in taking four pictures of Queen Victoria in her golden state landau on the occasion of her diamond jubilee. and 1924, at the studios of J. Russell & Sons in Baker Street in 1931, and at Foyles Art Gallery in 1943. The fees collected from such exhibitions and from reproductions of the photographs were shared between Stoneman and the NPG. These exhibitions also helped boost his reputation and increase his clientele.