Delamere & Sykes (1937)
Hardman conducted many portraits of clients on location, often with the client’s home featuring prominently within the shoot. Research has been conducted into these two location based portraits with the exact spaces having been found and presented next to the originals. The emphasis here is still firmly placed upon the ‘Intermission’ that exists between the pairings, but has moved away from being about the same individual, to focussing upon the actual physical space that still exists today.
Delamere
The first series was taken by Hardman at Vale Royal in Cheshire, which was the seat to the Barons of Delamere, belonging to the Cholmondeley family. The late father was Hugh Cholmondeley, the 3rd Baron of Delamere who died in 1931, some six years prior to this portrait being commissioned. The family moved away from Vale Royal shortly after this portrait was taken to relocate in Nairobi Kenya, where they still live on a 500,000 acre farm. His widow Gwladys is featured in the portrait with her children; she went on to become the first female Mayor of Nairobi. The young boy in the image was Hugh Cholmondeley and is now the 4th Baron of Delamere and still lives on the Nairobi estate. Contact was made with the family in 2015 and coincided with Hugh’s 80th birthday. He was said to have been very moved by the images of the family presented to him on his birthday, for which he had never seen before. Vale Royal was sold in 1947 and now serves as both a Golf Course Club House and private housing.
Sykes
The next series depicts Dr Sykes and his family at their home Ashurst in Formby. The occasion was their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1937. The image was taken in the back garden of the house which still exists today on Duke Street, in Formby. The plot however has now been divided and the physical space where the portrait was originally taken is now to be found in the land situated behind Formby Library. The wall can still be clearly seen and there is also still evidence of Dr Sykes’ famous orchard which still consists of a couple of fruit bearing trees (Pear & Apple). Dr Sykes is well known to the residents of Formby, as it was his intervention a few years prior to this portrait that rescued the land opposite his house from the developer’s planning to build on the site of the old Duke Street Dairy Farm. This land was subsequently gifted to Sefton Council by Sykes, with the strict instructions never to be developed, and remains as Duke Street Park to this day, still enjoyed by many Formby residents.
The recent images were all shot using similar equipment to what Hardman would have used back in the 1930's (Large Format 5x4 Sheet Negatives)
