Colombo Apothecaries Company

The Colombo Apothecaries Company was a commercial house, not a photographer, and its place in the visual record of Ceylon rests less on original work than on the negatives it gathered up. The firm was founded at Colombo in 1883 by J. Smith Finlay and W. M. Smith; the name Colombo Apothecaries Company dates from about 1892, by which time it was operating a photographic department alongside its other trade. In the middle 1890s that department acquired the entire negative stock of Scowen & Co, and it is said to have moved the photographic work to Kandy, where the climate was thought better suited to the process.

From the Scowen negatives, and from its own operators, the company issued a printed catalogue and sold Ceylon views to the tourist and export markets, so that images first made by Charles Scowen circulated for years under the Apothecaries imprint, dated after 1892 in some museum records though struck from negatives of the 1870s and 1880s. The firm’s output was the landscapes, city views, ancient ruins and ethnographic ‘types’ that the trade in Ceylon views demanded, printed and distributed on a commercial scale into the early twentieth century.

Because the company is a firm rather than a single hand, and because much of what bears its name is reprinted from the work of others, its own photographic authorship is difficult to separate cleanly from Scowen’s. Prints under the Colombo Apothecaries imprint are held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which catalogues them explicitly as printed by ‘The Colombo Apothecaries Co. Ltd’ after Scowen negatives, and in Cambridge University Library’s Royal Commonwealth Society collection; they appear regularly at auction, at Sotheby’s and Bonhams among others.