Original caption: “You have played very well indeed,” said “Bobby” Jones, when in the sixth round in the Amateur Open Championship, he walked towards Andrew Jamieson, the 21-year-old Scot, who had defeated him on the 15th green.
Pollok House from the south bank of the White Cart Water, 1856, photographed by Duncan Brown.
Duncan Brown (1819-1897) was a talented amateur photographer whose work documents aspects of Glasgow life from the 1850s until the 1890s. Brown appears to have visited the Pollok estates during his walks with Hugh MacDonald and the Literary and Artistic Club.
This photograph was taken two years after the publication of MacDonald’s book Rambles Round Glasgow in which he wrote: “The gardens and pleasure grounds of Pollok are on a princely scale of magnificence. The Cart, which is spanned by an elegant bridge in the vicinity of the house, winds beautifully through the park, which is finely sprinkled with clumps of wood and picturesque sylvan individualities… We have seldom, indeed, witnessed finer woodland studies than are to be found in the spacious park of Pollok… a single group of wych-elms… grace the bank of the river a little to the east of the mansion. These fine trees were described in Mr Strutt’s Sylva Britannica, published in 1826…”.
In the distance to the left is the Pollok House stable block. Behind the trees to the right is the White Cart Water and in front is a small tent with a man lounging outside it. This may be a photographer’s darkroom tent. The collodion method of photography was introduced in 1851 and was cheaper and quicker than any of the other photographic methods previously available. Unfortunately the collodion method required that the photograph was developed while the glass plate was still wet and so photographers had to take all the necessary equipment and a darkroom tent to the site.
