Annie Brassey (1839-1887) was a travel writer and collector. Many of the objects that she collected on her travels around the world in the 1870s and 1880s form part of the World Cultures collection here at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery. These were donated to Hastings in 1919 along with the Durbar Hall itself, which she had purchased from the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Brassey and her journeys are closely entangled with legacies of the British Empire.
Missing from this donation was Brassey’s collection of photographs. Annie Brassey used new technologies to document her family’s journeys in a way unimaginable to earlier travellers. She purchased commercial, tourist photographs at each destination that she visited, and she learnt how to take her own pictures. Brassey became a member of the Royal Photographic Society in 1873 and she had a darkroom fitted on board the Sunbeam, the family’s yacht, to develop and print her work.
Seventy of Brassey’s albums, containing over 5,000 photographs, are now kept in the Huntington Library in California, USA. This exhibition brings a selection of these images back to the museum collection for the first time in over 100 years.
This display has been curated by Sarah French as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between Hastings Museum & Art Gallery and the University of Sussex. Find out more at www.doingsofthesunbeam.wordpress.com.
Exhibition: Photographs of a Victorian Voyage: From the Annie Brassey Collection
Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, walkway gallery
until 29 January 2023
See: https://www.hmag.org.uk/see-and-do/exhibitions/photographs-of-a-victorian-voyage-from-the-annie-brassey-collection/
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