[Myanmar album.]

£8,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Felice Beato (1832-1909) counts among the most accomplished photographers of the nineteenth century. Born in Venice his parents took him to Corfu where he spent his early childhood. Little is known as to how he developed his photographic skills. He travelled widely (Malta, Turkey, India and China) before arriving in Japan in 1863. Beato set up a successful photo studio in Yokohama, the centre for foreign trade after the opening of Japan. In October 1866 he lost most of his stock in a major fire but he persevered and rebuilt. In 1877 he sold his firm to his former Austrian apprentice Baron Raimund von Stillfried, who had set up his own studio in 1871 and formed a partnership called Stillfried Andersen. In 1886, he moved to Burma, set up a studio in Mandalay, and immediately started publishing photographs in the Mandalay Herald and the Rangoon Gazette . “Felice Beato’s Mandalay studio expanded into Rangoon where it advertised itself as a retailer of Burmese carvings, silk, silverware curios, and only in a subsidiary way as a photographic studio. One addition to the Beato company portfolio was that they took over proprietorship of Watts Skeen, one of the best-known photographic studios in Rangoon. The take-over provided them with a large photographic stock that F. Beato Ltd could potentially exploit to its own advantage in developing an even wider range of photographic souvenirs” (Sadan). In 1908 he opened another studio, this time in Colombo. This selection of fifty images are

• Year: 1889

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