E. O. Hoppé’s Portraiture

Emil Otto Hoppé established himself as the leading producer of photographic portraits in Edwardian London, a position he augmented until the mid-1920s. Particular aesthetic, psychological and philosophical ideas undergirded his practices – practices which, in some respects, were then unconventional. His portrait work helped him to achieve some celebrity as an influential cultural figure, and this status in turn advanced his career as a portrait maker. Three important determinants of Hoppé’s portrait output are identified and elaborated upon: ‘The Maker’ (Hoppé himself); ‘Patronage’ (the actual or assumed demands of customers, including sitters); and – an entity that is less easy to define – ‘The Public’. Hoppé claimed, of certain eminent figures, that he had made ‘the recognised face’, and the sense of public recognition here implies that the likeness must combine intense insight with extensive circulation in the illustrated press. Viewed in retrospect, the range of Hoppé’s portraits – from such leading politicians as Philip Snowden, through such society beauties as Lady Hazel Lavery, to artists, including Jacob Epstein and Rudyard Kipling – punctuated a particular period of history, the cultural moment at which emerging aspects of twentieth-century modernity could be discerned. Exemplary in this respect, despite its unusual collage nature, is Hoppé’s depiction of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Depiction · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Portrait · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Travel Writing and Literature