Balmoral Castle Scotland Scottish New Photochrom Photo Print Photograph Picture

The2FunAdGuyz offer a new, high quality reproduction print of a magnificent 1890 photochrom of Balmoral Castle, Aberdeen, Scotland. This remarkable photochrom print captures the architectural style of the Scottish Neo-Baronial style. Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh use Balmoral as a summer residence. Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, privately purchased the estate in 1848, sight unseen. They completed the purchase in 1852, taking title to the old castle (now demolished) and the surrounding approximately 50,000 acres. Prince Albert retained the services of William Smith, City Architect of Aberdeen, Scotland to make renovations on the old castle. Soon the renovation plans turned into a plan for an entirely new structure about 100 yards from the old castle. Construction started in 1853 and completed in 1856, demolishing the old castle almost immediately. The photochrom company created this image about 34 years after.

Caption: Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 1890.

The photochrom shows Balmoral Castle standing amidst the lush, heather-covered hills of the Scottish Highlands. The Scottish Neo Baronial style, with its towers, crow-stepped gables, and turrets is the dominate style. Then, as now, Balmoral was a working estate. Queen Elizabeth owns the castle personally, not as sovereign. The Queen raises some 100 cattle on the land and it is also home to her famed Highland, Fell and Haflinger ponies. As seen in the movie The Queen, it is also a royal hunting preserve. For the record, The Queen did not shoot on the estate—another estate stood in as Balmoral.

A magnificent image, timeless though it is, captured in freeze-frame and not looking a great deal different some 120 years after its creation.

The hand coloring technique of this image used real paint, not water color, giving a deeper, more artistic look than later hand coloring techniques.

PHOTOCHROM: The photochrom process was a combination of photography and lithography that started in the 1800s and used until the development of true color photography in the 1930s. While the results can look more like a painting than a photograph, the images are striking. The photochrom (sometimes-spelled photochrome in America) system developed in Switzerland and then licensed to various companies in other countries. Detroit Publishing Company, Detroit, Michigan was the only company to license the process in the United States. The process first took black and white photographs and hand colored the resulting print. Then, using a special series of stone plates (minimum of four and up to 14 separate stones for a single print), prints could be reproduced in larger quantities. One of the reasons the results are so spectacular is that the pigments in the inks and ingredients to process the stones came from exotic locations around the world. The results—even more than a hundred years later—give us a unique, richly colored and very intense image.

ORIGINAL MEDIA: The Detroit Publishing Co. (original name Detroit Photo Graphic Company), Detroit, Michigan, originally produced the image used for this new print. During the last decade of the 1800s and early 1900s, they produced some of the finest photochrom images. Unfortunately, cheaper (and frequently lesser quality) printing methods spelled their demise.

PAPER QUALITY: This new print is on a highest quality, acid-free, 100-pound glossy premium text paper that allows for maximum color brilliance and fidelity for older images.

Image Size: 16.5 inches wide by 10.5 inches high.

Paper Size: 17 inches wide by 11 inches high. This allows for a small border around the image for matting and framing. When matted, this format is perfect for a standard 16-inch x 20-inch frame, a manageable size for a wide variety of decorating purposes.

AVAILABILITY: In Stock! – Ships Within 1 Business Day of cleared payment.

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