The current touring exhibition The English Cathedral features photographs taken at each of the country’s 42 Anglican cathedrals.

A few weeks ago, I visited the exhibition during its stay in Newcastle (until Thursday 24th May 2023), stop number 13 in its pilgrimage to each of the featured locations.

It features the work of Peter Marlow (1952-2016) who was originally commissioned by the Post Office in 2008 to photograph six English cathedrals to feature in a set of commemorative stamps.

He was so inspired by the project that he determined to visit the remaining 36 and this touring exhibition is the result.

Each of the photographs takes the same viewpoint, looking down the nave from west to east.

The result is a wonderfully rich and varied record of the architecture of buildings whose histories span hundreds of years.

If you get the opportunity to visit the exhibition during its tour, I would highly recommended that you do so. Dates for the rest of 2023 are on the link below.

https://petermarlowfoundation.org/journal/the-english-cathedral-touring-exhibition-datea/

In the past, England’s cathedrals have been photographed many times by both professionals and amateurs.

Among the professionals was my wife’s great great uncle Percy R. Salmon FRPS (1872-1959) whose life and career feature elsewhere on this blog.

From around 1897 to 1899, he worked as a travelling photographer for the stereoscopic 3-D photography company of Lévy et Ses Fils of Paris (or Lévy Fils et Cie as it is also known).

According to the Leeds Mercury (3rd June 1899), one of his commissions involved stereographing “all the English cathedrals.”

Inspired by visiting The English Cathedral and seeing Peter Marlow’s work, I wondered if it might be possible to identify any of Mr. Salmon’s cathedral stereos.

My first port of call was the website of the Roger-Viollet Collection in Paris whose archive features stereos he took for Lévy during an 1898 expedition to Egypt, Palestine, Turkey and Greece.

A “cathedrals” search yielded a sequence of six (3448-10 to 3448-15) that, like those from his 1898 trip, were colourised at some point by Lévy using gouache, a water-soluble paint.

Dated by Roger-Viollet to between 1895 and 1900, the circumstantial evidence suggests that they could be the work of Percy R. Salmon.

Three feature Westminster Abbey, scene of the recent Coronation of King Charles III but, as I learned from visiting The English Cathedral exhibition, not in fact a cathedral and so not photographed by Peter Marlow.

Another shows the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral whilst the remaining two in the sequence feature Buckingham Palace (taken from an unusual side-on angle) and St. James’s Palace, both in London.

On this occasion, the cost of obtaining high-resolution versions of these stereos for publication is beyond my budget, but I hope you will enjoy viewing this watermarked version of the interior of

St. Paul’s, possibly by Percy R. Salmon.

You can view the other stereos identified in this blogpost by inputting the reference numbers (eg. 3448-10 3448-11, etc) in sequence into the Roger- Viollet website’s search engine.

https://www.roger-viollet.fr/home.php

Encouraged by the existence of these stereos and armed with the knowledge that Lévy also produced postcard versions, I spent time on Ebay to see if I could find any of them.

That search continues, but I have been able to purchase this black-and-white stereo postcard of the interior of Canterbury Cathedral produced by “Lévy Fils et Cie, Paris” and bearing its signature “L.L.” branding.

Is this the work of Percy R. Salmon FRPS? If he was commissioned by the company to stereograph “all the English cathedrals” during 1897, it is certainly a possibility worth considering.

Meanwhile, our Percy R. Salmon research project continues.

If you are a postcard collector or have examples of Lévy stereos or lantern slides, please use the comments box below to contact me.

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