William Lake Price (ca.1810 - 1896)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Photographer. Associate of the Old Water-Colour Society. Author of A Manual of Photographic Manipulation.

Born in 1810, although he originally trained as an architect and was for a time articled to Auguste Pugin, he was later to abandon architecture for watercolour painting after having lessons from De Wint. He became a well known lithographer and occasionally painted in oils, exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1828 and 1832. As a photographer he produced portraits, still lifes, interiors, landscapes and genre subjects, he exhibited at The London Photographic Society between 1855 and 1860. In July 1858, The Atheneum reported the publication of Eminent British Artists Lake Price’s portraits of John Phillip, David Roberts, Augustus Egg, F. Taylor (probably John Frederick Tayler), Edward Ward, Alfred Elmore, Clarkson Stanfield and Daniel Maclise, praising their ‘clear, common sense, and a quiet, strong good taste, which have seized without trick, strain, effort or affectation the leading points of each painter’s manner, pose and dress…’. Although Lake Price’s apparatus, photographs and negatives were sold in 1862, he continued to lecture and write on photographic subjects.Living in Blackheath in 1891, he died in 1896.