Sydney Prior Hall

Sydney Prior Hall (1842–1922), special artist to The Graphic, accompanied the Prince of Wales’s tour of 1875–76 and depicted the Prince’s landing at Colombo and, on 2 December 1875, the elephants and masked dancers of a Perahera rehearsal at Kandy.

Hall was born at Newmarket in Suffolk in 1842, the son of the sporting painter Harry Hall, and trained at the Royal Academy Schools before becoming one of the leading illustrators of The Graphic from its early years. For the Indian tour he was engaged as the special artist appointed to accompany the Prince of Wales in person, paid six hundred pounds for seven and a half months’ service, and he travelled as the royal party’s own draughtsman rather than as the correspondent of a paper alone; the friendship formed on the voyage lasted, and he was afterward a guest of the future King Edward VII at Sandringham and Abergeldie. The royal ship, HMS Serapis, reached Colombo on 1 December 1875, and Hall’s Ceylon drawings, the landing and the rehearsal of the Kandy Perahera with its elephants and masked dancers, belong to those first days of the island visit.

His work from the tour reached the public in two forms beyond the pages of The Graphic: his watercolours and drawings were exhibited at the South Kensington Museum alongside the gifts the Prince had received in India, and his sketches illustrated William Howard Russell’s official narrative, The Prince of Wales’ Tour: A Diary in India, published in 1877. In his later career Hall turned increasingly to portraiture and to the recording of public occasions, and a substantial body of his portrait drawings is held today at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He died in 1922.