Sarah Angelina Acland

Saarah Angelina ("Angie") Acland was born on 26 June 1849  and passed away on 2 December 1930. She was an English amateur photographer, known for her portraiture and as a pioneer of colour photography.  She was credited by her contemporaries with inaugurating colour photography "as a process for the travelling amateur", by virtue of the photographs she took during two visits to Gibraltar in 1903 and 1904. She visited Madeira during the early 20th century where she stayed at the Reid’s Hotel. She took many photographs in and around the location of the hotel. The hotel had a darkroom for use by guests.

Sarah Acland was the daughter of Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, and Sarah Acland, after whom the Acland Hospital in Oxford was named.

As a child, Sarah Acland was photographed by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson with her friend Ina Liddell, the sister of Alice Liddell.  At the age of 5, she and one of her brothers presented a trowel to Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, Chancellor of Oxford University, at the laying of the foundation stone for the Oxford University Museum. The art critic John Ruskin taught her art and she also knew a number of the Pre-Raphaelites. She even assisted Dante Gabriel Rossetti when he was painting murals at the Oxford Union.

At the age of 19, Acland met and was influenced by photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Ackland took portraits and landscapes. For example, she took a portrait photograph of the Prime Minister William Gladstone during a visit by him to Oxford. 

Acland started to experiment with colour photography in 1899. Her earliest work was accomplished using the Ives Kromskop and Sanger Shepherd colour processes, in which three separate photographs were taken through red, green, and blue filters. In 1903 Acland visited her brother Admiral Acland at his home in Gibraltar. Acland took photographs of Europa Point looking out from Europe to Africa, pictures of flora in the Admiral's residence, The Mount, and the author and ornithologist Colonel William Willoughby Cole Verner. In 1904, she exhibited at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain with 33 three-colour prints under the title The Home of the Osprey, Gibraltar.

She later used the Autochrome process of the Lumiere brothers, introduced in 1907. In her later life after the death of her father, until her death in 1930, Sarah Acland lived in Park Town, North Oxford, taking many colour photographs there.

Sarah Acland was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS) and the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

She never married, and in 1901, the year after her father's death, she moved to Clevedon House, now 10 Park Town, Oxford, where she died in 1930. A blue plaque was dedicated to her on this house on 24 July 2016.

A collection of Acland's photographs is housed at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The Bodleian Library in Oxford has catalogues of her photograph albums and papers, dating from the late 19th century.