USING the darkroom-equipped punt that can be seen in the foreground of the view of Windsor reproduced right, Victor Prout (1835-77) spent five years photographing views along The Thames from London to Oxford.
Forty such panoramas, mounted on card with printed captions, make up a rare complete example of the 1862 first edition of that work which sold for £13,000 at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on March 1. Prout used a camera that employed a lens that could swing round and scan progressive sections of the view he wanted to capture. The albumen prints from wet collodion negatives were loose as issued in the publisher’s now soiled but original morocco backed cloth portfolio.