Francis Bedford was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 photographer.

Life

Francis Bedford was the son of the successful church architect Francis Octavius Bedford

Francis Octavius Bedford

-Life:In 1812-13 Francis Bedford made a tour of classical antiquities in Greece, Turkey, Italy and Sicily on behalf of the Society of Dilettanti, in the company of Sir William Gell, Keppel Craven and John Peter Gandy...

. He began his career as an architectural draughtsman and lithographer, before taking up photography in the early 1850s.

In 1854, at the Marlborough House Queen Victoria commissioned him to photograph objects in the royal collection.

Photography Records

On February 19, 2009, Swann Galleries

Swann Galleries

Swann Galleries is a New York auction house founded in 1941. It is a specialist auctioneer of antique and rare works on paper, and it is considered the oldest continually operating New York specialist auction house....

set an auction record for Bedford's work Photographic Pictures Made by Mr. Francis Bedford During the Tour in the East, a suite of three albums from 1862. They albums sold for $132,000.