Alice Hughes, Rita Martin & Lallie Charles – Pioneering Portrait Photographers

Gladys Cooper by Rita Martin

Over the Easter Holidays, my mother and I were going through an old photo album that used to belong to my grandmother. Nestled in among the many sepia and black and white images of babies, children and family gatherings, was a beautiful hand-tinted Rotary Postcard dating from the 1920's featuring Stage and Screen Actress Gladys Cooper.

Apparently the highly photogenic Ms Cooper was one of my grandmother's favourite movie stars. When I got home I did some research and discovered that she was the subject of many picture postcards from the Edwardian era. I am now in the process of writing a potted biography of her life and career.

What interested me most about the classic vintage postcard my grandmother kept, was that the picture was credited to a female photographer - Rita Martin. I subsequently discovered that Rita was not the only female member of her family to pick up a camera and shoot "celebrity" subjects.

Rita Martin - Self Port

The Martin Family were originally from Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Rita was born Margaret Wier Martin on 19th July 1874 and her elder sister Charlotte Elizabeth Martin had been born on 11th April 1867. There were at least two other younger Martin sisters who were also involved in photography - Isobel and Beaulah nicknamed "Bea".

The Martin Sisters left Ireland and came to live in London sometime in the late 1800's. One of the most influential female photographers in London at the time was Alice Hughes, daughter of the portrait painter Edward Hughes.

After studying photography at the London Polytechnic Alice Huges opened a studio in 1891  in Gower Street, London. She photographed her first royal sitter, the Duchess of Fife with her baby, Princess Maud in 1893. On the expiry of her lease in 1911 she sold her business, and later opened another studio on Ebury Street, where she operated until her retirement in 1927. Hughes worked in platinotype and started the fashion for women to be photographed in large hats and evening dress in the style of the artists Reynolds and Gainsborough. Hughes also specialised in the graceful posing of mother and child groups. In her day, Alice Hughes was a leading photographer of royalty, fashionable women and children. During her most successful periods, she employed up to 60 women and took up to 15 sittings a day. Hughes refused to photograph any male subjects or have any men working in her studio.

Madame Lallie Charles -Self Portrait

 It is highly possible that both Rita Martin and her older sister Charlotte - whose professional name was Lallie Charles - worked for a brief period of time for Hughes in London where they quickly learned their craft and were inspired by Hughes' style of portraiture. 

Alice Hughes rejected the standard sepia, pictorialist view for the very expensive, beautifully rendered platinum prints in sharp focus. One of the criticisms of Pictorialism, then and now, was that the photographers frequently confused artistic excellence with vapid sentimentality. A soft focus view of a society lady admiring a tulip might sound like a good idea in theory but the result could make her look as fascinating as a blade of grass in a paddock.

Lallie Charles and Rita Martin took Hughes’ ideas further and when it came to publishing commercial picture postcards they saw the virtue in refining them, reducing background interference, or simply removing it altogether. Their success also owed as much to their ability to impart or inspire a performance for the camera, something that few Edwardian actresses had been seriously expected to do for photographs up until then.

Lallie Charles who later referred to herself as "Madame Charles" - was the first Martin sister to open her own photography studio, at "The Nook", 1 Tichfield Road, Regents Park. In 1897 her sister Rita came to work with her as an assistant, and by 1901, her younger sister Isobel was also working there, and a 4th sister, Bea Martin also helped out. 

As the prominence of female photographers grew from the Victorian to Edwardian era, the photographer H.S. Mendelsson declared in 1903 that Portraiture was "now in the hands of the women" whilst female photojournalists like Christina Bloom and Kate Pragnell were also trailblazing new techniques and styles outside of the studio.

Child Group by Rita Martin

In 1905 Lallie married 33 year old Harold Carr, who was a ladies mantle manufacturer. Their wedded bliss was short-lived however, as just 5 years later Harrold Carr died on 17th May 1910 leaving Lallie a widow. Lallie continued with her work as a photographer and by 1911 she had moved into a new studio in 39a Curzon Street, Mayfair, where Charles and Mary Leech her Butler and Cook, took care of all her domestic needs whilst she worked in the studio. Lallie's subjects were usually members of the Royal Family and notable society beauties.

In 1906 Rita had also branched out and opened her own photographic studio at 27 Baker Street, Marleybone. Rita specialized in portraits in pale colours against a pure white background. Her main subjects were famous actresses of the time, including, Lily Elsie, Julia James and Lily Brayton. Rita also photographed many children. The Actress Gladys Cooper's children were often captured by Rita's camera.

Lallie Charles and Rita Martin became two of the best-known female portrait photographers of their day - but today interest in their work is confined mainly to private collectors and they are no longer a household names despite the high standard of their images and their innovative techniques. 

Rita Martin Child Photography

A 1910 review by The Strand Magazine said "Rita Martin deserves to be singled out for praise. Perhaps a time will come when there will be annual exhibitions of the best achievements of professional photographers, as there is now for professional painters, and when that time comes the work of these artists will be highly valued by the critics. In the art of the camera as it concerns the taking of children I should put sympathy first— sympathy even before technical skill in posing and lighting."

 Rita Martin did a lot of important work with children as the subject.Her most reproduced child studies were of the Luke Children whose father, a carpenter, was responsible for building Rita's second studio at 77 Baker Street. Martin also photographed Queen Elizabeth and Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the Queen Mother when they were both children.

Hand Tinted Rita Martin Postcard

Martin’s “conventional” child portraits were distinctive as she took pains to include the subject’s hands creating a somewhat bashful appearance. Martin’s child subjects were usually accompanied by some kind of prop like a sofa, bathtub or other whimsical scene. Consistent with Victorian attitudes about the innocence of children, they were shot in various stages of undress. The artist usually refrained from giving her work titles as postcard producers would likely attach their own phrases to punch up their appeal anyway. Many images saw multiple releases in various forms—including some colorized and some in sepia.

Talking about her, Cecil Beaton said: "Rita Martin, and the pale terracotta loveliness of her photographs are part and parcel of this period. Rita Martin and her sister, Lallie Charles, the rival photographer, posed their sitters in a soft conservatory-looking light, making all hair deliriously fashionable to be photo-lowered".

With their studio's only being a a few miles apart in highly fashionable areas of London, the two talented sisters were actually business rivals, having to compete alongside the many other photography businesses run by men which were springing up all over the capital as the fashion for  having photographs taken increased in popularity.

The Martin Sisters at Tichfield Road Studio

The Photo opposite from the National Portrait Gallery database shows Lallie Charles, Rita Martin ad their sister Bea Martin in Lallie's Tichfield Road studio c1899. The furnishings and decor are typical of a high-end studio of the Victorian age, with oriental screens, rugs, vases, elaborate wooden chairs and tables and plenty of potted plants & flowers. 

In 1975 Cecil Beaton co-authored with Gail Buckland a personal history of photography, The Magic Mirror, to which he added an appendix; Commercial Photographers of the Victorian and Edwardian Era. Like the other appendices it accounted for photographers who hadn’t fitted with the general theme of the book. Rita Martin and Lallie Charles were given more attention than anyone else in this section. There’s a sense reading it that Beaton knew Rita Martin but not Lallie Charles as she died aged 55 in on 5th April 1919. Cecil Beaton intimates in his book that the two sisters fell out before Lallies death. She left £11,636 in her will - but neither Rita nor any of her sisters were left any money, so this may be true.

Rita Martin and Lallie Charles had defined for Beaton what studio portraiture could achieve. For Beaton, artificiality is a compliment. In The Magic Mirror he says of both sisters that “they transcended the stereotyped (and) showed a tyranny over their subjects, who were willing to do their bidding, for they knew they were being beautified”. Beaton could be describing his own working methods. 

Lily Brayton by Rita Martin

During the first decade of the twentieth century, photographic postcards of stage actresses were popular around the world. Most studios placed the subject before an elaborate stage backdrop, emphasizing the theatricality above the performer. Rita Martin preferred to place her women in a stark setting that obliged the viewer to consider their stage presence.

Rita Martin had a contract with the theatre manager George Edwardes that gave her rights to photograph Lily Elsie and other performers once a month. Other studios also photographed Ms Elsie. One was Foulsham and Banfield, whose work Beaton waspishly described as “rather quaint in their woodenness”. The general impression is that all power resided with management. Edwardes could agree to a regular contract, as long as Ms Martin kept her fees to a figure he thought was reasonable. A successful performer like Lily Brayton also had enough influence to ask for Rita Martin personally, and if sales of postcards justified her demands Edwardes would agree.

Although Rita Martin photographed several leading men of the stage too, of the 322 prints held by the National Portrait Gallery, only three are of men alone, and a couple are of men with their families. The number of prints is enough to be representative and suggests that like Alice Hughes, Rita Martin had principles that she couldn’t be persuaded from. The first instinct is to say these were political, but it may have been that she was essentially interested in glamour. That wasn’t a word many male actors would have wanted to be associated with in the 1910s. It implied an interest in haute couture and other womanly pursuits. When you look through lists of images of male Edwardian actors, they tend to go for either comedy or dashing but respectable, and were typecast as one or the other. Lily Brayton on the other hand could wear costumes from across the centuries and cultures and still transmit an aura of chic allure. For a photographer of the stage like Rita Martin, male actors were considered boring.

Rosamund Massy by Rita Martin

According to the NPG website, Lallie Charles photographed some of the suffragettes and Rita Martin photographed Rosamund Massy from the National Women’s Social and Political Union. Were the Martin Sisters sympathisers with women's suffrage? Were they asked to photograph these women simply because they were well-known women photographers themselves? Or was it because, like Lily Brayton the actresss, the suffragettes were part of the current cultural milieu? The answer may be yes all three questions but it’s worth remembering that while London’s theatre world might have been progressive in thought, there wasn’t a huge amount of sympathy for the suffragettes within the acting profession, especially when they started setting fire to theatres and letting off smoke bombs inside. Rita Martin may have believed that women had the right to vote and agreed to photograph some of the suffragettes but that didn’t mean she was obliged to like any of them personally or felt a desire to dedicate her photography efforts for the greater good of the cause. 

Why has the work of Lallie Charles and Rita has been forgotten today? It isn’t as if their photographs are hard to find - as a search of the internet will prove . Rita Martin was still well known in the 1940s for Cecil Beaton to assume his readers needed no formal introduction to her. Perhaps, like her sister, Rita's work is seen today as too establishment and too Edwardian for modern tastes. Her portraits of theatre stars don’t cast such a challenging light on social history like the work of Christina Bloom does.

Lily Brayton by Rita Martin

A common myth about early theatre portraits is that they were perfunctory commercial in nature and the genre didn’t take off until a handful of photographers in the 1930s (Beaton in particular) introduced an individual style. If that is the case, then portraits of Lily Brayton by Rita Martin reveal a relationship between photographer and subject that was decades ahead of its time.

Rita Martin died aged 83 in 1958. The legacy that Rita and her elder sister Lallie Charles left was that they both recognized the commercial potential of photography and became early female pioneers in portraiture. 

A few negatives by Rita Martin and Lallie Charles are preserved at the National Portrait Gallery and were donated by their niece Lallie Charles Martin Cowell in 1994, who was also photographed regularly by both sisters.

Lallie Charles Martin Cowell - Niece of Rita Martin