The George Washington Wilson Photographic Collection, now in the care of the University’s Historic Collections, consists of over 40,000 glass plate negatives produced by the Aberdeen firm of George Washington Wilson & Co. during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Wilson's camera ranged all over Britain, recording everything from the simple grandeur of Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa to the bustle of London's Oxford Street with its street criers and horse-drawn cabs. His son, Charles Wilson, and staff photographer, Fred Hardie, toured the colonial townships of South Africa and Australia, providing a vivid picture of gold miners and early settlers at work and play, and of the native or aboriginal way of life. The Collection also contains views of the western Mediterranean, with images of Gibraltar and the south of Spain, Morocco and Tangiers.
George Washington Wilson (1823-93), born in the North East of Scotland, went to Edinburgh and then London in the 1840s to train as a portrait miniaturist. He became established in Aberdeen in the 1850s as an ‘artist and photographer’, and quickly made a name for himself among the middle classes and landed gentry. He soon moved into landscape photography and, thanks to the proximity of Balmoral, developed a royal connection which remained throughout his career.
With his photographer’s tent, his glass plates and chemicals and Dallmeyer camera, he made numerous forays into the scenic heart of the Scottish highlands and islands, as well as many other sites on the UK mainland (as far south as the English Channel) and even parts of Northern Ireland.
Throughout, Wilson demonstrated technical and commercial acumen, and, by the early 1880s the company he founded had become the largest and best known photographic and printing firm in the world.
The stock of G. W. Wilson & Co. was auctioned off in 1908. The plates passed into the possession of Fred Hardie, and then to the photographer, Archibald J. B. Strachan, who, on moving to new and smaller business premises in 1954, offered them to the university Library. The University is pleased to acknowledge the foresight and beneficence of Mr Strachan.
