Weirdness at Bumforthmanor - A New Photographic Exhibition

The delightful weirdness of The Bumforth Manor Collection - a selection of photographs by the renowned Victorian eccentric inventor and proto-surrealist Samuel Heracles Gascoigne-Simpson.
Contains nudity. Contact us for tickets to Private View evenings.

About the Exhibition:
For over five generations, the Gascoigne-Simpson family owned Bumforth Manor, a crumbling draughty pile of dubious architectural merit near Grantham in Lincolnshire. The Bumforth Manor pictures are just a few from a large number of glass plates discovered in the attic. These plates languished undiscovered, for over a hundred years in a lead-lined oak chest which bore the initials S.H.G.S. They are undoubtedly the work of Nicholas' Great Grandfather Samuel Heracles Gascoigne-Simpson (1839-1910), who was a disciple of William Henry Fox Talbot - widely considered to be the Father of Photography.

Gascoigne-Simpson experimented during the mid to late 1800s with advanced photographic techniques and portraiture. His book Homo Eccentrica was self-published in 1896, but was later removed from the shelves after booksellers and libraries found the inks used to be still active.

S.H.Gascoigne-Simpson was known to have developed the 'transient puff' method of moving liquid light sensitive silver mercury emulsion via the use of a vacuum air blower onto the surfaces of electrically charged zirconium alloy plates. This often dangerous and explosive process actually received a patent in 1876, but it was later withdrawn after several technicians were said to have changed colour after handling the highly toxic and unstable materials.

From the early 1860s up until his death in 1910, the family seat of Bumforth Manor was Gascoigne-Simpson's studio and laboratory. Friends, relations, dignitaries, servants, local land-owners, land workers, clergy, eccentrics, oddballs, degenerates and the unfortunate all found themselves (often against their will) clamped into place in his drawing room studio under the unblinking glare of his 'brass eye'.