[ROWING] The Radley and Eton crews, Henley, 26 June 1858.

Two albumen print photographs with hand tinting, in uniform arch-top format, dimensions 75 x 62 mm; mounted side-by-side on the recto of a nineteenth-century album leaf, with a fully contemporary pencilled caption between the pair reading ‘Radley and Eton crews, Henley, June 26, 1858’; beneath each print (in pencil, in the same hand as the main caption) is a list of names of each crew, the Radley crew including the renowned oarsman and sculler Walter Bradford Woodgate (1841-1920), who would go up to Brasenose College, Oxford, two months after these photographs were taken; the Eton print has a tiny section of loss at lower right edge, otherwise both prints are in excellent condition; on the same side of the leaf are mounted six slightly later views of Oxford in identical format, all captioned; the verso has a superb large albumen print, 145 x 200 mm, of a group of Oxford dons, probably early 1860s (not captioned); the leaf was extracted by a previous owner from an album compiled by an Oxford student.

This historically significant pair of photographs of the Radley and Eton crews are amongst a handful of images taken at the 1858 Henley Regatta which together constitute the earliest documented rowing photographs. (Note, however, that no other examples of the Radley and Eton crew images are known).

We believe each of the pair once made up “one half” of a hand-tinted stereoscopic photograph by S. E. Poulton, as they share the same format, dimensions and colouring technique as the Poulton stereoview of the Exeter College crew taken at Henley in 1858 which is in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (84.XC.979.6757).