W. L. H. Skeen

William Louis Henry Skeen (1847–1903) was born in London on 1 July 1847, the son of William Skeen, who from 1849 held the post of first officially appointed Government Printer of Ceylon. In 1860 the elder Skeen bought a Colombo photographic studio, which traded at first as S. Slinn & Co; his son, having trained at the London School of Photography, took charge of it in 1862 and in 1868 renamed it W. L. H. Skeen & Co. Under that name it became the foremost photographic firm of the island by the 1870s, and it continued, under a succession of managers, until about 1920.

The studio’s subject was the colony itself in the decades of its commercial transformation. Skeen photographed the cultivation of coffee and, after the leaf blight, of tea; the construction of the Ceylon railway across the 1860s to the 1890s and of the Colombo breakwater in the 1880s; the harbours, estates and roads of the interior; and the island’s people, recorded both as portraits and as the ethnographic ‘types’ the period demanded. He supplied the plates for his father’s books, among them The Knuckles and Other Poems (1868) and Adam’s Peak (1870), and the firm photographed the elephant kraal staged for the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1870. A branch studio was opened at Kandy in 1891.

Skeen died in Ceylon on 26 January 1903. Prints bearing the Skeen imprint survive in numbers, the firm having been the island’s principal supplier of views to residents, travellers and the official record alike; they are held in the Royal Collection, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland, and Cambridge University Library’s Royal Commonwealth Society collection catalogues the firm as W. L. H. Skeen & Co (1860–1920). It should be kept in mind that ‘W. L. H. Skeen & Co’ names a commercial studio as much as a single hand: many photographs issued under it were made by operators the firm employed across its long working life.