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Felice Beato (1832 – 29 January 1909), also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first photographers to take pictures in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato’s travels to many lands gave him the opportunity to create powerful and lasting images of countries, people and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. To this day his work provides the key images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War. His photographs represent the first substantial oeuvre of what came to be called photojournalism. He had a significant impact on other photographers, and Beato’s influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting.
The origins and identity of Felice Beato have been problematic issues, but the confusion over the dates and places of his birth and death seems now to have been substantially cleared up. Based on a death certificate discovered in 2009, Beato is known to have been born in Venice in 1832 and to have died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. The death certificate further indicates that he was a British subject and a bachelor. It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and so Beato would have qualified as a British subject.
Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed “Felice Antonio Beato” and “Felice A. Beato”, it was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow managed to photograph at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. But in 1983 it was shown by Chantal Edel that “Felice Antonio Beato” represented two brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image.
By 1863 Beato had moved to Yokohama, Japan, joining Charles Wirgman who had been there since 1861. The two formed and maintained a partnership called “Beato & Wirgman, Artists and Photographers” during the years 1864–1867. Wirgman again produced illustrations derived from Beato’s photographs while Beato photographed some of Wirgman’s sketches and other works. Beato’s Japanese photographs include portraits, genre works, landscapes, cityscapes and a series of photographs documenting the scenery and sites along the Tōkaidō, the latter series recalling the ukiyo-e of Hiroshige and Hokusai. This was a significant time to be photographing in Japan since foreign access to (and within) the country was greatly restricted by the Shogunate. Beato’s images are remarkable not only for their quality, but for their rarity as photographic views of Edo period Japan.
Beato was very active while in Japan. In September 1864 he was an official photographer on the military expedition to Shimonoseki. The following year he produced a number of dated views of Nagasaki and its surroundings. From 1866 he was often (gently) caricatured in Japan Punch, which was founded and edited by Wirgman. In an October 1866 fire that destroyed much of Yokohama, Beato lost his studio and negatives, and he spent the next two years working vigorously to produce replacement material. The result was two volumes of photographs, ‘Native Types’, containing 100 portraits and genre works, and ‘Views of Japan’, containing 98 landscapes and cityscapes. Many of the photographs were hand-coloured, a technique that in Beato’s studio successfully applied the refined skills of Japanese watercolourists and woodblock printmakers to European photography. From 1869 to 1877 Beato, no longer partnered with Wirgman, ran his own studio in Yokohama called “F. Beato & Co., Photographers” with an assistant named H. Woolett and four Japanese photographers and four Japanese artists. Kusakabe Kimbei was probably one of Beato’s artist-assistants before becoming a photographer in his own right. Beato photographed with Ueno Hikoma and others, and possibly taught photography to Raimund von Stillfried.
Felice Beato with Saigo Tsugumichi (both seated in front), with foreign friends. Photograph by Hugues Krafft in 1882.
In 1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea. The views Beato took on this expedition are the earliest confirmed photographs of the country and its inhabitants.
While in Japan, Beato did not confine his activities to photography, but also engaged in a number of business ventures. He owned land and several studios, was a property consultant, had a financial interest in the Grand Hotel of Yokohama and was a dealer in imported carpets and women’s bags, among other things. He also appeared in court on several occasions, variously as plaintiff, defendant and witness. On 6 August 1873 Beato was appointed Consul General for Greece in Japan, a fact that possibly supports the case for his origins being in Corfu.
In 1877, Beato sold most of his stock to the firm, Stillfried & Andersen, who then moved into his studio. In turn, Stillfried & Andersen sold the stock to Adolfo Farsari in 1885. Following the sale to Stillfried & Andersen, Beato apparently retired for some years from photography, concentrating on his parallel career as a financial speculator and trader. On 29 November 1884 Beato left Japan, ultimately landing in Port Said, Egypt. It was reported in a Japanese newspaper that he had lost all his money on the Yokohama silver exchange.
From 1884 to 1885 Beato was the official photographer of the expeditionary forces led by Baron (later Viscount) G.J. Wolseley to Khartoum, Sudan in relief of General Charles Gordon. None of the photographs Beato took in Sudan are known to have survived.
Briefly back in England, in 1886 Beato lectured the London and Provincial Photographic Society on photographic techniques. But by 1888 he was photographing in Asia again, this time in Burma, where from 1896 he operated a photographic studio (called ‘The Photographic Studio’) as well as a furniture and curio business in Mandalay, with a branch office in Rangoon. Examples of his mail order catalogue — affixed with Beato’s own photographs of the merchandise on offer — are in the possession of at least two photographic collections. Knowledge of his last years is as sketchy as that of his early years; Beato may or may not have been working after 1899, but in January 1907 his company, F. Beato Ltd., went into liquidation. The discovery in 2009 of Beato’s death certificate indicates that he died on 29 January 1909 in Florence, Italy. The death certificate also notes that he was born in Venice in 1832.
Photographs of the 19th century often now show the limitations of the technology used, yet Felice Beato managed to successfully work within and even transcend those limitations. He predominantly produced albumen silver prints from wet collodion glass-plate negatives. Beyond aesthetic considerations, the long exposure times needed by this process must have been a further stimulus to Beato to frame and position the subjects of his photographs carefully. Apart from his portrait-making, he often posed local people in such a way as to set off the architectural or topographical subjects of his images, but otherwise people (and other moving objects) are sometimes rendered a blur or disappear altogether during the long exposures. Such blurs are a common feature of 19th century photographs.
Like other 19th century commercial photographers, Beato often made copy prints of his original photographs. The original would have been pinned to a stationary surface and then photographed, producing a second negative from which to make more prints. The pins used to hold the original in place are sometimes visible in copy prints. In spite of the limitations of this method, including the loss of detail and degradation of other picture elements, it was an effective and economical way to duplicate images.
Beato pioneered and refined the techniques of hand-colouring photographs and making panoramas. He may have started hand-colouring photographs at the suggestion of Wirgman or he may have seen the hand-coloured photographs made by partners Charles Parker and William Parke Andrew. Whatever the inspiration, Beato’s coloured landscapes are delicate and naturalistic and his coloured portraits, though more strongly coloured than the landscapes, are also excellent. As well as providing views in colour, Beato worked to represent very large subjects in a way that gave a sense of their vastness. Throughout his career, Beato’s work is marked by spectacular panoramas, which he produced by carefully making several contiguous exposures of a scene and then joining the resulting prints together, thereby re-creating the expansive view. The complete version of his panorama of Pehtang comprises nine photographs joined together almost seamlessly for a total length of more than 2.5 metres (8 ft).
While the signatures he shared with his brother are one source of confusion in attributing images to Felice Beato, there are additional difficulties in this task. When Stillfried & Andersen bought up Beato’s stock they subsequently followed the common practice of 19th century commercial photographers of reselling the photographs under their own name. They (and others) also altered Beato’s images by adding numbers, names and other inscriptions associated with their firm in the negative, on the print or on the mount. For many of Beato’s images that were not hand-coloured, Stillfried & Andersen produced hand-coloured versions. All of these factors have caused Beato’s photographs to be frequently misattributed to Stillfried & Andersen. Fortunately, Beato captioned many of his photographs by writing in graphite or ink on the back of the print. When such photographs are mounted, the captions can still often be seen through the front of the image and read with the use of a mirror. Besides helping in the identification of the subject of the image and sometimes in supplying a date for the exposure, these captions provide one method of identifying Felice Beato as the creator of many images.
