FRANCIS EMOND CURREY. Birch Trees, Ballyin Road Hatch, c. 1880s. 6.1x8" platinum or similar metal print. Inscribed in pencil on print verso: Birch Trees Ballyin Road Hatch.

This beautiful tree study is an early platinum type of print from the 1880s.

Francis Edmond Currey was born in England on March 15, 1814. He lived at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Ireland, and acted as agent for the Duke of Devonshire's Irish properties. With the duke largely absent from the estate, Currey was treated as lord of the manor, with ample time to practice photography as an amateur, a pursuit he took up in the latter part of the 1840s. Currey was an experimentalist, taking full advantage of the resources and production facilities of a country estate. Much of his early work was in calotype, with the subjects mostly local, including the people whose work Currey supervised and the land over which he had stewardship. He also built a glasshouse studio on the estate.

He joined the Royal Photographic Society, 1853, and was one of its oldest members at the time of his death on June 6, 1896. He exhibited at the RPS's 1856, 1864, and 1870 exhibitions.

He was also joined the Photographic Exchange Club (England) in 1855, and the Amateur Photographic Association in 1862. Between 1856 and 1865 Currey submitted wet-collodion views to exhibitions in London and Dublin, and he maintained an interest in photography until late in life.

While his work is quite scarce, examples are in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Princeton University, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Rochester Visual Studies Workshop, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Rijksmuseum, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Excellent.