Dorothy Wilding (1893–1976): Portrait Photographer

Explore how Dorothy Wilding’s stylistic portraits shaped stamp design from King George VI onwards in this fascinating article by Michael Peach—featured in Gibbons Stamp Monthly, the UK’s best-selling stamp magazine.

DOROTHY WILDING (1893–1976): PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER

By Michael Peach

From the start of the reign of King George VI, images by Dorothy Wilding shaped how the stamps of that reign and the next would look in the UK and around the Commonwealth. A leading portrait photographer of the day, she became the first woman to be appointed as an official royal photographer and, as Michael Peach shows, her images have appeared on stamps up to the present day.

A telephone call on 12 January 1937 initiated the use of Dorothy Wilding’s portraits on stamps. The call requested Dorothy to come to Buckingham Palace to photograph the Queen. King Edward VIII had abdicated on 10 December 1936 and Prince Albert, Duke of York, became King George VI on 11 December. The coronation of King Edward had been scheduled for 12 May 1937, and it had been decided that the coronation of King George would be held on the same day. Consternation at the Post Office! It had originally been planned to issue a series to mark the coronation of King Edward. While photographing the Queen, the King came in dressed in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet and Dorothy was able to take pictures of both of them. A coronation stamp was issued on 13 May 1937, one day after the coronation (Fig 1). The stamp was designed by E Dulac and based on Wilding photographs of the King and Queen. The photographs were also used on stamps issued to commemorate the 1939 royal visit to Canada (Fig 2) and Newfoundland (Fig 3).

Earl life and career

Dorothy Wilding was born in Gloucester on 10 January 1893, the ninth child of Richard Wilding, a commercial traveller, and the fourth daughter with his second wife, Mary Martha Edwards. Her parents decided to send her, at age four, to be brought up by her childless aunt and uncle, Fanny and Thomas Jones, a draper, in Cheltenham Spa. The ambitious young lady wanted to make her mark on the world. She purchased her first camera and tripod in 1909 from a shop in the Cheltenham Promenade, where there is still a camera shop. She taught herself the art of photography. Very early on, she formed an interest in the techniques of lighting.

The 1911 census shows that she was living in Birmingham and her occupation is listed as photography. Despite family objections, she moved to London, becoming an apprentice with retoucher Ernest Chandler and working with three leading West End photographers: Walter Barnett, Richard Speaight and Marion Neilson. By 1914, at the age of age 21, she had saved enough money to open her first studio in George Street off Portman Square. In 1918, she moved to larger studios in Regent Street and then to Bond Street in 1924. After her move from George Street, she began experimenting with artificial lighting.

During the 1920s and 1930s, portrait photography in England enjoyed a golden era. Amongst the many photographers in London, Dorothy Wilding excelled as the most successful and most fashionable woman practitioner. Her many clients included the glitterati of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Wilding went on to become England’s most successful portrait photographer and, despite having been associated, as a photographer, with Mrs Simpson and Edward VIII, she became the first woman to be granted ‘By Appointment’ status to the Royal Family. In 1937, the year she was invited, as the first woman, to take the official accession and coronation photographs of George VI and Queen Elizabeth, she opened another studio in New York.

Wilding was not only a great photographer but also a great lighting technician. She created her own individual style in which the important elements included lighting, simple art deco props and plain white backgrounds produced authoritative, elegant and geometric compositions. This accomplishment, when combined with her distinct artistic flair, produced some of the greatest photographic portraits of the last century. Her autobiography In Pursuit of Perfection was published in 1958. Her surviving archives were presented to the National Portrait Gallery (London) by her sister Mrs Susan Morton in 1976 and formed the basis of a major NPG retrospective exhibition, ‘The Pursuit of Perfection’ and catalogue in 1991 with the same title (Terence Pepper, Dorothy Wilding: The Pursuit of Perfection, National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1991).

She married twice. In 1920, when 24, she married Walter Portham, a 49-year-old leather merchant. The marriage was in effect a father-daughter relationship. They were divorced in 1932, and Walter later died of a heart attack during World War II. Her second marriage, in 1932, was to a long-time friend, the interior decorator, painter and Mayfair architect, Thomas ‘Rufus’ Leighton Pearce. She had no children. She retired in 1958. By this time, her style of portraiture had become unfashionable.

In her later years, she concentrated on interior decoration. At the age of 83, after a long illness, she died on 9 February 1976. Her death was noted in the ‘Deaths, In Memoriam’ column of The Daily Telegraph but not a single obituary was published.

Several of Wilding’s royal portraits were used on stamps of Great Britain and the Commonwealth up to the early 1970s.

King George VI

Besides the previously mentioned stamps, her portraits of the King and Queen were used on some pre-war definitives. The King is in uniform on the early New Zealand definitives (Fig 4) and the Queen appears on early Australian definitives (Fig 5). Various other Commonwealth countries also produced stamps using Wilding photographs.

The two 1944 New Zealand Health stamps each had a Wilding picture of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret in Girl Guide uniforms (Fig 6).

In early 1947, The King, Queen and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret toured South Africa, as well as Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Swaziland (Eswatini), Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana) and South West Africa (Namibia). Commemorative stamps were issued. The three South African stamps showed the King and Queen, the two Princesses and one with the King wearing his naval uniform (Figs 7, 8 and 9). The other countries had variations on these stamps and one with the King and Queen in the centre and a Princess on either side. The South African stamps were overprinted ‘SWA’ for South West Africa. The portraits were all Wilding photographs.

Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday on 21 April 1947 and Newfoundland commemorated this with a stamp using a Wilding portrait of the Princess (Fig 10). As Newfoundland joined Canada on 1 April 1949, this was the last Newfoundland stamp featuring a member of the Royal Family and the penultimate Newfoundland stamp. On 20 November 1947, she married Lt Philip Mountbatten. There were no stamps issued by Great Britain, but a special slogan postmark was in use from 20 to 30 November. However, it did not go unnoticed by various Commonwealth countries. The Australian and Canadian Royal Wedding stamps showed the Princess’s birthday portrait.

The King and Queen’s Silver Jubilee occurred on 26 April 1948. The portrait of the King and Queen was on the British stamps and also on the common design for many Commonwealth countries. The 1948 Wilding photograph shows the profile of the Queen partially over that of the King (Fig 11).

In 1949, the first post-war Canadian definitive issues featured the King in mufti rather than military uniform used during the war (Fig 12).

Queen Elizabeth

When the King died on 6 February 1952, Princess Elizabeth became Queen. The Post Office had, of course, no picture of the sovereign suitable for use on postage stamps. Dorothy Wilding took a large number of photographs of the young Queen on 16 February 1952. Wilding portraits of the Queen were a prominent feature of many earlier stamps of her reign. There were two main portraits, The Queen facing left as seen on British stamps and The Queen facing right, as seen on the Canadian stamps. A third shows the profile of The Queen facing left.

The first British definitive stamps of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the 1½d. (printed matter rate, inland and overseas) and 2½d. (inland letter rate) Wilding definitives, were issued on 5 December 1952 (Fig 13), other values followed. Decimal Day occurred on 14 February 1971 and the Wilding definitives were replaced by the Machins with values in decimal currency.

The Wilding image was first used to identify the country on three of the four Coronation stamps (Fig 14) and various subsequent commemorative stamps. In 1986, the portrait was on one of the stamps in the series to mark the Queen’s 60th Birthday (Fig 15).

Reissued portraits

Various Wilding type definitives were reissued in Prestige Booklets with values in new pence. The 1998 booklet, The Definitive Portrait, had 20p light green, 26p red-brown and 37p light purple stamps, all of the original 5d. design (Fig 16). The 2002 Gracious Accession booklet had the original ½d. orange-red and 1½d. green reissued as second and first class respectively. The 2003 booklet, A Perfect Coronation, had a 47p bistre brown and 68p grey-blue, both from the original 1s. design (Fig 17).

Miniature sheets with Wilding-style definitives with values in pence marked the 50th anniversaries of the first (Fig 18) and second (Fig 19) issues in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

For the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the miniature sheet with various iconic images of The Queen had a modified light-brown 1s. Wilding stamp as a first class stamp (Fig 20).

On 9 September 2015, The Queen became the longest reigning British Monarch and the Long to Reign Over Us miniature sheet included first class stamps with the Wilding and Machin definitive images (Fig 21).To mark the 50th anniversary of the Castle high value stamps, they were reissued in 2005 with values now in decimal currency retaining the Wilding Queen to identify the country (Fig 22).

The facing-left image was also used by several Commonwealth countries. The South African and Australian Coronation stamps had this image (Figs 23 and 24), as did the early low-value New Zealand definitives (Fig 25).

Australia had the Wilding profile of The Queen facing left in the 1953–58 series of low-value definitives (Fig 26). This image was used by New Zealand for the 3d. value of the Coronation series (Fig 27) and that was reissued with a 90c. value for the Golden Anniversary in 2003.

The Wilding photograph of The Queen facing right was used by many Commonwealth countries, such as the 1954 Coronation Omnibus stamps (Fig 28). The Golden Jubilee of the British Queen’s Accession series in 2002 featured studio portraits of The Queen by five different photographers. The second class stamp had a 1952 image abstracted from the Wilding portrait (Fig 29). The first Canadian Wilding definitive, the blue 5c., was issued on 1 April 1954 (Fig 30), and the others, 1c. to 4c., on 10 June 1954, replacing the Karsh portrait series from the previous year. They were replaced in turn by the Cameo issue in 1962. The 7½d. 1954 Australian royal visit stamp shows this Wilding image (Fig 31).

Perhaps fittingly, the first and last stamps of the Queen Mother had portraits taken by Dorothy. The Queen Mother’s 90th Birthday stamp was reissued in 2002 as a mourning stamp (Fig 32) and has a portrait from early in her reign as Queen.

The Dorothy Wilding archives are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London (www.npg.org.uk).