Alice Mary Hughes (1857–1939) was a leading London portrait photographer specializing in images of fashionable women and children.^[1]

Biography

Hughes was the eldest daughter of the portrait painter Edward Hughes (1832–1908). After studying photography at the London Polytechnic she opened a studio in 1891 next to her father's in Gower Street, London which she operated until December 1910.^[2] In her day, she was a leading photographer of royalty, fashionable women and children producing elegant platinotype prints. During her most successful periods, she employed up to 60 women and took up to 15 sittings a day.^[3] In 1914, for a short period before the First World War, she ran a business in Berlin but returned to London at the beginning of the war, opening a studio in Ebury Street in 1915.^[3]^[4] The Ebury Street studio was not as successful as her first business and she closed it in 1933, retiring to Worthing where she died after a fall in her bedroom in 1939.^[5]

From 1898 to 1909, she contributed several hundred portraits to Country Life. In 1910, she sold 50,000 negatives to Speaight Ltd.^[5]

Assessment

A pioneer of portrait photography, Hughes developed a distinctive style "by fusing the conventions of society portraiture with the cool, monochromatic tones of the platinum print." (From Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)^[3]