Biography

Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834–1918) learned photography after emigrating from England to Bowmanville, Ontario. In 1862, she moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where she established her own successful photographic studio. From babies to convicts, fanciful tableaux vivants to dignified family portraits, for nearly fifty years Maynard’s studio captured a growing and dynamic Victoria and its citizens. The studio also gave her a place to engage with photography as a creative practice, and over the course of her career, she experimented with the photographic innovations of her time. Maynard’s technically skillful—and immensely playful—photographs were unique among studio photographers in Canada and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century.

The Photographer and the Shoemaker

Hannah Hatherly (later Hatherly Maynard) was born on January 17, 1834, in Bude, Cornwall, a town on the Celtic Sea in southwest England. Historically a working harbour, Bude became a popular tourist destination for beach excursions during the Victorian era. Hannah’s family was middle-class, with her father, John, listed in the 1851 census as a master mariner, the highest grade of seafarer licence for commercial vessels. The teenaged Hannah met Richard Maynard (1832–1907), listed in the same 1851 census as a shoemaker living with his father, Thomas, a cordwainer, just over two kilometres inland in nearby Stratton. Hannah and Richard were married on March 24, 1852.

The invention of the medium of photography was formally announced only five years after Maynard’s birth. Often referred to as a “simultaneous invention,” the process of fixing an impression of the world using light and chemicals was put forth by both the English Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and the French partnership of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851).  The daguerreotype produced a singular yet highly detailed image, while the talbotype (also known as calotype) produced a grainy, yet reproducible image that would establish the basis of the negative-positive process. Whether French or British, both had in common the fact that their invention was precipitated by increasing interest in observational science and a previous century of industrialization, a development that also shaped the mining and shipping industries of Maynard’s Cornwall throughout the eighteenth century.

Perhaps inspired by her father’s adventures as a mariner, or the prospect of finding new opportunities as Cornwall’s tin mining industry declined in the mid-nineteenth century, the newlywed couple left home for Canada.  By 1853, the Maynards had settled in Bowmanville, a small but growing town on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, just east of Toronto. The Maynards were two in a sizable wave of settlers to Ontario from Cornwall, many of whom settled just twenty kilometres away in nearby Oshawa.  Bowmanville was a microcosm of the British settlements springing up across what was then Canada West. Founded by United Empire Loyalists attracted to its fertile land and natural harbour, the town grew steadily, becoming a mercantile centre with mills and other small businesses, and eventually a station on the Grand Trunk Railway. Richard established himself as a shoemaker with a shop at the corner of King Street and Silver Street. It was during this time that Hannah and Richard started their family, with the births of their children George (1852–1926), Zela (1854–1913), and Albert (1857–1934).

In 1858, Richard joined thirty thousand other gold seekers headed for the Thompson River in present-day British Columbia, where prospectors had discovered gold in 1856. The event served as a catalyst for European-Canadian settlement in the region, while also drawing in prospectors and miners from China, the United States, Mexico, and the West Indies. As the final place to resupply before heading into the goldfields, the small, unincorporated town of Victoria swelled in population from mere hundreds to more than five thousand almost overnight.

Hannah, who remained in Bowmanville with their three children while also pregnant with their fourth, Emma (1859–1893), took up her own prospects during Richard’s absence. It’s not known what may have inspired her to take up photography in this moment or to where she turned to learn the skills she needed. There were no photographic societies or photography schools in Bowmanville, though it was home to at least one professional woman photographer in the 1860s, Pauline (Polly) Ann Hayward Henry (1825–1913), whose studio was based in nearby Oshawa. The town also boasted the larger professional firm of R. & H. O’Hara: Photographers, Booksellers, Insurance Agents, Etc. Perhaps she learned photography from either of these; at the very least, she had access to the cameras, equipment, and chemicals she would need.

From the outset of photography’s invention in 1839, many women picked up the camera for creative, leisurely, or entrepreneurial reasons. As early as 1841, a Mrs. Fletcher in Pictou, Nova Scotia, was advertising her daguerreotype photographic practice in a local newspaper. In Quebec City in the 1850s, Élise L’Heureux (1827–1896) and her husband Jules-Isaï Benoit Livernois (1830–1865) established a photographic studio that over the next one hundred years would become one of the most prolific in the nation.  Photography studios like that of Montreal’s William Notman (1826–1891), which had locations across Canada and the United States, employed women in photographic printing rooms. Outside of professional practices, countless women took up photography as a leisure pursuit documenting their families and travels, thoughtfully compiling their images into richly-decorated and annotated private albums.

Maynard was one of many women picking up the camera, but one of a few who would embrace photography as an entrepreneurial as well as creative pursuit. When Richard returned to Bowmanville from the west Hannah had committed herself fully to her photographic practice. Richard had done well in the goldfields—so well that his success would later be noted in Biographical Dictionary of Well-known British Columbians, an 1890 publication about the province’s prominent citizens.  Between the windfall from Richard’s prospecting and Hannah’s creative endeavours, the two must have felt an itch for new opportunities. When news of British Columbia’s most famous gold rush, the Caribou Gold Rush, made its way to Bowmanville in 1861, the shoemaker, the photographer, and their family relocated to the Pacific Coast.

Establishing a Studio

On March 6, 1862, Hannah, Richard, and their children, along with their trunks filled with shoemaking equipment and photographic supplies, arrived in Esquimalt, Vancouver Island aboard the steam ship SS Sierra Nevada. In an interview with the local Daily Colonist newspaper on the occasion of her retirement, Hannah described Victoria as a city “of tents, gullies, and swamps,” where “the inhabitants were mostly miners” and “a great many people… gave every promise of growth and development.” When Richard departed for the goldfields of the Stikine River on June 11, 1862, Hannah and the children settled into a house on Johnson Street. As had been the case in 1858, Richard once again “made considerable money mining.” Indeed, Richard’s work in the goldfields, likely as a prospector (though no specific records exist about precisely what his work was), afforded the Maynards enough capital to quickly set up two new enterprises in Victoria.

Within a year, Hannah established “Mrs. R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery” on Victoria’s Johnson Street, near Douglas Street. Just around the corner, Richard opened his shoe and boot shop on Fort Street. In the same interview from 1912, Hannah recalled, “There was always plenty of money in the town and business was excellent…. A photograph had the same mysterious charm then that it has today, despite the wonderful improvements that have taken place in the art. Sailors were always coming to us. You see, Esquimalt was then in use as a naval base or something of the kind and sailors were always in town. They were great on photographs.”  Maynard’s photographs of Victoria reveal a town in the making. Wooden buildings and plank sidewalks lined its muddy streets. The constant turnover of people travelling to and from the goldfields made for a rough environment of new wealth, squandered fortunes, and, as reported in its newspapers, no shortage of crime.

The constant influx of people into Victoria represented an opportunity for a portrait photographer like Maynard. The clientele was inexhaustible: those headed for the goldfields, or returning from them, would see a photographic portrait as a way to commemorate their monumental endeavour. Opening her studio doors to them, as well as the numerous sailors and the town’s growing population of permanent residents, was both exciting and daunting. At the same time, it was enterprises like Maynard’s that created a literal foundation for settlement, turning Victoria into not just a stop on the way to and from the goldfields, but a permanent home and community worth investing in.

Maynard specialized in producing cartes-de-visite, photographic calling cards, usually 3.75 by 2.25 inches (9.5 x 5.7 cm), that could be exchanged just like business cards today. People collected them and placed them into albums or small frames. Maynard’s cartes-de-visite were popular because she was attentive to the needs and personalities of her sitters. For example, in a portrait of Ah Foo, a Chinese cook who worked for the ethnologist Charles F. Newcombe (1851–1924), the sitter presents himself proudly, occupying the whole of the frame and directing his gaze at the camera. He rests his arm on a table carefully decorated with a chawan (tea bowl) and flowers, props that reoccur in several photographs produced by Maynard. With few ways to reassure family and friends (who were oceans and continents away) of your well-being, the cartes-de-visite provided a photographic means to do so while also being small and sturdy enough to be sent by post. Like those of other professional studio photographers, Maynard’s cartes-de-visite often featured a design on the back with the studio’s name and address to attract further clientele.

The Mrs. R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery offered Maynard independence and financial stability. This was important, as Richard was often away, and prospecting was neither easy nor reliable work; moreover, there was always a real possibility that he might not return. Of course, a woman as sole proprietor of a business was not always welcome at this time. It makes sense, then, that she operated her studio under her husband’s name, “Mrs. R. Maynard.” She delicately balanced Victorian understandings of women’s roles that were often confined to domestic spaces, to motherhood, and to the standards and fashions of respectable taste, all while pursuing an outward-facing role in her community and establishing professional networks beyond her husband’s. The studio facilitated the Maynard family’s upward mobility as they set down roots in their new community and developed relationships with the city’s permanent residents.

Dovetailing Interests

It was likely during their first few years in Victoria that Hannah taught Richard photography. Whether out of interest, or because it would create new opportunities, the expertise of operating a camera let Richard pursue commissions from the government, which sought to utilize photographs as part of its record-keeping of land and people. In 1858, on the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition, photographs were used for the first time in Canada as part of a government initiative to map and demarcate land through topographical surveys. These photographs, and those made on many other subsequent surveys, were included in albums and official reports that recorded colonial settlement and progress. Richard’s newly acquired skill with the camera, coupled with his outdoor hardiness from his time prospecting, made him ideal for this work. In addition to providing sets of photographs to the government, Richard sold the same images directly through Hannah’s studio, reaching a broader audience, among them the itinerant miners who were eager to obtain views of the people and places they had seen. The photographs Richard took showed Indigenous lands, sites, and people, as well as settler establishments and infrastructure. When the photographs sold through the studio, there was sometimes a blurring of authorship with photographs taken by Richard affixed to backings with Hannah’s name.

While Richard primarily photographed landscapes, Hannah maintained the studio practice, although the two often travelled together across Vancouver Island and as far afield as Alaska. Richard made several photographs of Hannah on their travels, and she purchased souvenirs such as small woven baskets to decorate the rooms of her studio. In 1874, Hannah and Richard consolidated their respective photography and shoemaking businesses into a single location on Douglas Street, not far from Hannah’s first studio on Johnson Street. The two-storey building on Douglas Street featured a large, dedicated space for her photographic work as well as a darkroom, the place where Maynard would not only print her photographs, but also practice, sharpen, and experiment with the photographic techniques and innovations of her moment. As an advertisement published in 1888 in The New West, a directory of businesses in towns along the newly constructed Canadian Pacific Railway, put it: “[Hannah Maynard] possesses superior facilities for executing all orders in the promptest most satisfactory manner, and her photographic work cannot be excelled for brilliancy of expression and harmony of effect, and she is recognized as one of the foremost representatives of the profession in the country.”  Hannah and Richard’s business remained on Douglas Street for the next eighteen years, until 1892.

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Maynard built her studio practice on her skillful portraits, photographing everyone from government officials to children. In addition to European settlers, Maynard’s studio doors were open to Indigenous, Chinese, and Black sitters wanting to be photographed. She utilized backdrops and props to help her sitters represent aspects of their personalities. For example, playful painted backgrounds of flowers and even swings hanging from the ceiling were used with children, while serious sitters with distinguished social roles, like a governor or mayor, would be placed in front of a stately architectural backdrop. Oftentimes, the backdrops of Hannah’s photos were of large scenic vistas of the area, likely drawn from Richard’s landscapes. It was also during this time that Maynard began experimenting with tricks that could produce different effects in her portraits. For example, in Unidentified Child at a Mock Beach, n.d., a photograph of a young girl posed in the studio as if at a beach, she uses cleverly placed mirrors to create the semblance of reflected water.

Occasionally, the couple’s interests dovetailed. One example, which no longer exists but was described in the Victoria Daily Chronicle includes a collection of views taken by Richard and assembled into a panorama by Hannah. In a number of their collaborations like this one, credit for the work went to Richard rather than Hannah. As the Victoria Daily Chronicle wrote of it, “a very clever panorama… formed of a series of photographic pictures neatly joined together. It is the work of Mr. Maynard, photographer of Johnson Street, and is completed in a very careful and artistic manner. It would certainly give a stranger a better idea of the appearance of the town than any verbal description.”

This sort of misattribution of their photographs shows up sometimes in nineteenth-century newspapers. However, Hannah and Richard’s attitude appeared to be that what benefited one ultimately benefited the other. In 80 Views on the Frazer River, c.1885, Hannah assembled Richard and his colleague Frederick Dally’s photographs into a collage, which she then rephotographed as a single negative from which multiple copies could be produced. This was a clever idea that took advantage of Richard’s landscape photography as well as having a brick-and-mortar studio from which to print and sell the photographs to an eager public—something that many itinerant photographers who worked on commission did not have. By teaching Richard photography, Hannah expanded his opportunities to make social connections with government officials by meeting their photographic needs that would further drive a more sophisticated clientele to her studio, where they could have their portraits made and purchase landscape photographs.

A Family Business in a Growing City

The Mrs. R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery flourished alongside the growing city of Victoria. Officially incorporated in 1862, just as the Maynard family arrived, it became the provincial capital when British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871. Gaining the trappings of a settled community, Victoria established a police force in the 1870s and created public spaces such as Beacon Hill Park in 1882. With the studio’s move to the Douglas Street address in 1874, Hannah Maynard’s personal and professional lives grew even more intertwined.

Following the births of daughters Emma Jane (1859/60–1893) and Laura Lillian, or “Lillie” (1867–1883), Maynard was able to include her five children in the day-to-day operations of the studio. Her sons Albert (1857–1934)—who would eventually take over the Mrs. R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery—and George (1852–1926) worked in both Hannah’s photographic studio and Richard’s shoe and boot shop. Emma was so active in the photography studio that, at twenty-one years old, she declared “photographer” as her occupation in the 1881 census. There are also several photographs in the Maynard family collections at the BC Archives that are attributed to Laura Lillian (1873–1951), Hannah and Richard’s granddaughter who became a favourite subject of Maynard’s toward the end of her career. Alongside family, several employees worked for the studio throughout its existence, most notably Arthur S. Rappertie (1854–1923) who acted as Maynard’s assistant and staff photographer and would become as close as family, eventually moving into the Maynard home with his mother.

Maynard’s family was ever-present in the studio space both physically and photographically, as illustrated by a portrait of Maynard seated at her desk in the parlour of her studio, produced around 1895. In the image, she is wreathed by the photographed faces of family members. The studio, by the same token, was also an extension of Maynard’s domestic space. The plants, props, furnishings, textiles, art, and curios that would normally be understood to adorn the home of a well-to-do nineteenth-century woman can all be seen in Maynard’s professional space. Even in her portraits of other women, such as her portrait of Victoria resident Mary Lydia Jones Shaw, created between 1883 and 1889, Maynard was attentive to how a woman’s private and professional lives could be represented as a reflection of her station within society.

Maynard’s reputation as one of Victoria’s most talented photographers brought notable citizens and visitors through her door. For example, Lady Amelia Connolly Douglas (1812–1890), wife of B.C.’s first governor, James Douglas (1803–1877), was photographed on several occasions by Maynard, including in one where she is sitting with her grandchild. In reminiscing about her career, Maynard remarked:

I think I can say with every confidence that we photographed everybody in the town at one time or another…. In my albums I have numberless pictures taken by us in those far off days and I never look at them without wondering how the tremendous changes in social conditions have been brought about…. In looking over my albums it is possible for me to observe the gradual transitions from one state of things to another. Each one had its individual charm and taken all in all it was a wonderful experience to have seen a city as it were from the beginning grow into the beautiful proportions and possibilities of the Victoria of today.

Indeed, Maynard’s photographs created a multifaceted portrait of a growing city.

Creative Experimentation and
Personal Sorrow

Throughout her career, Hannah Maynard referred to herself as a “photographic artist.” Her professional identity can be seen stamped across the backs of her cartes-de-visite. The backs of Richard’s photographs also bear this title. While many studio photographers, including Montreal’s William Notman, used this term, it was less typical for photographers like Richard to refer to themselves in this way because their images were made for government record-keeping. Unlike painting, photography would not have been understood as a fine art at this time. However, Hannah’s technical skill as well as her ability to conceptualize and create an idea or vision through the medium fits within our contemporary understanding of photography as an art form. Both Hannah and Richard used the phrase “photographic artist” to highlight the technical quality of their work.

Maynard used her creativity to market a unique aspect of the studio. Starting in 1881, Maynard produced a series that is often referred to as the “Gems of British Columbia.” At the end of each calendar year, she would gather the portraits of all the children she had taken in the previous twelve months and incorporate them into a single photographic collage, and then send it to their families as a New Year’s greeting. What made this series a particular triumph was not just her use of collage, but that as years went on, she also included the faces from each prior year in the latest Gem. By 1896, when Maynard created her final Gem, there were literally thousands of tiny faces included in the work. Not only did Maynard’s Gem series advertise her ease working with children—a difficult task for any photographer in an era where long exposure times required their little subjects to sit still for anywhere between several seconds to a minute—but it also served as a testament to her technical abilities.

Maynard’s photographs garnered international attention and acclaim as she became increasingly involved in communities of photographic practice beyond Victoria. Beginning in 1879, she frequently submitted photographs and commentary to trade publications such as the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer and The Practical Photographer, for which she often received great praise. Tips shared among readers—amateur and professional photographers alike—afforded Maynard the opportunity to learn about cutting-edge techniques, including composite photography and multiple exposure. Around the 1880s, Maynard began to experiment with a variety of these techniques, creating whimsical images that give insight into her wry sense of humour. The most impressive among Maynard’s works are a class of photographs referred to as “photo-sculptures,” portraits, including Portrait from life; bust of a young girl, n.d., in which a living person appears as a statue mounted on a pedestal.

Maynard’s interest in the technical aspects of the medium, such as various methods of exposure and printing, also led to practical photographic applications. She frequented Beacon Hill Park with her grandson, Maynard McDonald (1882–1936). Avid cyclists, the pair created a collection of images that capture bicycles in motion. Starting in 1897 the Victoria Police Department, located just a block away from Maynard’s Pandora Avenue studio, commissioned her to produce mug shots. In many of these photographs, such as Prisoner 298, c.1903, she used a mirror to combine frontal and profile views in a single image.

In 1895, The Practical Photographer complimented Maynard’s use of multiple exposure, writing: “The first page of the supplement is from the studio of Mrs. Maynard, of Victoria, British Columbia, and represents the lady herself in three different positions. All these were cleverly taken on one plate.”  The commentary perhaps refers to Hannah Maynard in a tableau vivant, c.1895, where three Hannahs appear simultaneously in a single image, bound together with a series of props: a duster, a letter, and flowers.

As Maynard received international attention, this period of her life was deeply impacted by a series of deaths in her family. The first was her daughter, Lillie, who passed away from typhus in 1883 at sixteen years of age. Her daughter-in-law, Adelaide, the wife of her son Albert, died almost a decade later in 1892. The loss of Maynard’s daughter, Emma, followed a year later in 1893.

After Emma’s death, her son Maynard lived with his grandmother. Like his mother, little Maynard was heavily involved at the studio, but this time in front of the camera instead of behind it. Together, Hannah Maynard and her grandson used photographic tricks to create composite images and cheeky tableaux vivants for the camera. Often, these scenes, such as Hannah Maynard and her grandson, Maynard McDonald, c.1893, would include, in their backgrounds, photographs Maynard had taken of her daughters while they were alive. Perhaps it was the trauma of loss, balanced against the whimsy that comes with having a young child around, but starting in the late 1890s Maynard’s photographs became both increasingly sorrowful and playful.

In March of 1892, the photographic studio reopened at its third and final location, on 41 Pandora Avenue. Purpose-built, the brick building served as a photography studio, shoe and boot store, and family residence. Maynard occupied the top floor, which featured large windows to give her ample light. Here she worked with multiple exposure, montage, and mirrors—methods that required technical acumen as much as they did creativity. While Maynard’s works are often discussed by scholars as outlets for her grief and spiritual practices, she also used them to drive her photographic business, featuring them in clever advertisements.

“Just As I Am”

Maynard’s husband, Richard, retired from shoemaking and photography in the late 1890s. He passed away on January 10, 1907. Maynard continued her work; in fact, the time after his retirement was one of her most productive periods and involved taking on large public commissions, including one from the Victoria Police Department to photograph prisoners. It was also a period in which Maynard turned her lens more directly on leisure and her family, making many photographs of family excursions and large group portraits of her and Richard’s several grandchildren. Her family also absorbed her long-time assistant and staff photographer Arthur S. Rappertie, who is often present in these large group photographs, as is his ailing mother, who took up residence in one of the rooms in Maynard’s Pandora Avenue building.

Maynard retired in 1912, on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of her first studio in 1862. Many local newspapers made an affair of the occasion with lengthy announcements filled with praise and gratitude for the impact her photographic studio had on the community. The Victoria Daily Times, for instance, wrote: “Ever since [1862] the business has been in existence and is well known through being the pioneer business of its kind in the city, having commenced here just twenty-three years after Daguerre discovered the science. The albums collected by Mrs. Maynard during her residence here are replete with historical figures from which one might easily tell the story of the province.”

The Daily Colonist produced a full-page feature on Maynard that described her as “an exceptionally bright person, both in intelligence and habits, her years resting lightly upon her mind and frame.”  The interview that accompanied it is the only extant source in which she recounted the highlights of her own career. After her retirement, her son Albert, formerly an auctioneer and a taxidermist for the Royal BC Museum, took over the photography business.

Maynard died six years after her retirement, on May 15, 1918, somewhat unexpectedly at the age of eighty-four. She was buried in her family plot in Victoria’s Ross Bay Cemetery. Once again, the local papers paid significant tribute to Maynard as a person and as a photographer. The Victoria Daily Times noted that a hymn titled “Just As I Am” was sung at her funeral.  The hymn was deeply fitting for a woman who presented herself to the camera just as she was.

Both the shoemaking and photographic businesses were taken over by Hannah and Richard’s son Albert. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Albert expanded the photographic enterprise under a series of names including Albert H. Maynard, Successor to R. Maynard, Photographic Supplies and Apparatus; Albert H. Maynard, Photographic Supplies and Apparatus; and Maynard’s Photo Stock House. Later, he would go into partnership with P.G. Stewart (a Vancouver photographer) to form the Maynard and Stewart Photo Supply Company. It would have brought Hannah Maynard great joy to know that one of her granddaughters, Lillie Elizabeth Maynard (1884–1966), who spent a great deal of time in front of and behind Maynard’s camera, would have Albert’s portion of the photographic partnership transferred to her name in 1932. Around the same time, what is now known as the Royal BC Museum purchased from Albert the bulk of what remained of the studio’s records and nearly two thousand glass plate negatives made by other photographers acquired by the family.

Hannah Maynard left a body of work that revealed how her photographic practice was all-consuming and seeped into almost every facet of her life: her profession, leisurely bike rides, family cottage excursions, her relationship with her husband, children, and grandchildren, and her own sensibilities about life and death. To have such a full visual record of one person’s life and community as we have with Maynard is unique. That she was an expressive individual, and a prolific photographer, makes her collection even more distinctive.