Olive Edis

(Mary) Olive Edis was a British photographer who was famous for autochrome phototographs and portrait photography and served as a war artist in World War I .

• 

  Olive Edis. Autochrome self portrait

• 

  Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram. Bishop of London. Autochrome portrait

• 

  Autochrome seascape.

• 

  David Lloyd George. Platinum print portrait.

(Mary) Olive Edis was a daughter of Arthur Wellesley Edis.Professor of gynaecology at UCH. In 1903 she and her sister Katherine opened a studio in Sheringham, Norfolk where they specialised in portraits of local fisherman and members of the local gentry. She later had studios in Farnham, Surrey and Ladbroke Grove, London. Edis worked with platinum prints and from 1912 she pioneered colour autochrome photography . Her sitters included George Bernard Shaw, Emmeline Pankhurst and the Duke of York.^[1].

Olive Edis was one of the first women photographers to make use of the autochrome process and she patented her own design of autochrome viewers, termed diascopes. In 1920 she was commissioned to create advertising photographs for the Canadian Pacific Railway and her autochromes of this trip to Canada are believed to be some of the earliest colour photographs of that country.^[2] In 1914, Edis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. She was appointed an official war artist and photographed British Women's Services and the battlefields of France and Flanders 1918-19 for the Imperial War Museum ^[1]. She married a Cambridge academic Edwin Henry Galsworthy, a cousin of the novelist John Galsworthy. She died in 1955.^[3]

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Witness: Women War Artists. Catalogue for the exhibition at Imperial War Museum North 7 February 2009 – 19 April 2009
2. ^ Olive Edis (1876-1955) Luminous Lint biography accessed from http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/Olive__Edis/A/
3. ^ National Portrait Gallery biography of Olive Edis at: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?search=ss&firstRun=true&sText=edis&LinkID=mp10088

Persondata
Name	Edis, Olive
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death	1955
Place of death