Arthur Ludwig and Arthur Ewing Princehorn Collection, ca. 1900-2014
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Administrative/Biographical History
Arthur Ludwig Princehorn (1870-1931)
Arthur Ludwig Princehorn was born in Mansfield, Ohio and attended Oberlin College from 1890-1892. As a student he had a part-time job as a taxidermist in the college museum. In October 1892 he married Agnes Royce Ewing of Oberlin, which meant that he could no longer be a student at Oberlin College. They moved to New Rochelle, New York, where Princehorn was appointed assistant at the Glen Island Museum of Natural History in 1894; subsequently his titles changed to Preparator and Curator.
To fulfill his duties Princehorn determined that he needed a camera to capture birds and animals in motion and in their native habitat. He proceeded to invent such a camera and finished his first model in 1899. With that camera Princehorn photographed members of the Sioux tribe brought to Glen Island in 1901 as part of the resort amusements. Princehorn’s grandson, James Princehorn, has stated that his father’s camera was the prototype of the modern Graflex.
He and his wife returned to Oberlin in 1905, working as a photographer in town and a letter carrier for the Post Office until he was appointed the Oberlin College “Mechanician” in 1917. Beginning In that year he served as the photographer for Clarence Ward, Oberlin College Professor of Art and Director of the Allen Art Museum, a major role for the College photographers that continued through 1949.
On the inventory of glass plate negatives pre-dating Princehorn’s tenure at the College, an interior view of Finney Chapel is listed as copyright 1910 by A. L. Princehorn. This suggests that the College either engaged Princehorn on an assignment basis prior to 1917, or that individual images taken by Princehorn during his freelance years in Oberlin were subsequently acquired from him by the College. From then on Princehorn kept the negatives he produced as a College employee in meticulous date and subject order, a system inherited by his sons and perpetuated during Arthur Ewing Princehorn’s long career as Oberlin College’s photographer.
Princehorn’s job title was changed to “Photographer” in 1927. His son Glen M. Princehorn joined him in some capacity in the College’s photography studio from 1926 until 1933, when Glen opened his own studio in Lorain. Glen died there in 1940 at the age of 44. Another son, Arthur Ewing Princehorn, joined his father’s photographic staff at the College in 1929. Arthur Ludwig Princehorn served the College as its official photographer until his sudden death on February 6, 1931 at the age of 61 during a photographic assignment.
Arthur Ewing Princehorn (1904-2001)
Arthur Ewing Princehorn, son of Arthur Ludwig and Agnes Ewing Princehorn, was born in 1904 in Glen Island, New Rochelle, New York. He and his parents moved to Oberlin in 1905. He graduated from Oberlin High School in 1924. A. E. Princehorn served his apprenticeship in photography under George Campbell, portrait and commercial photographer in New York and also under Lewis M. McCormick, a pictorial photographer in the New York Camera Club. Princehorn undertook correspondence courses from the American School of Photography in Chicago and the New York Institute of Photography in New York City. He joined the College staff in 1929 as his father’s photography assistant, and upon his father’s sudden death in 1931 he became the official College photographer.
Arthur E. Princehorn’s numerous responsibilities as College photographer included keeping a complete photographic record of all of the art works in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, doing the photographic work for the Museum’s “Bulletin,” taking pictures for such Oberlin publications as the Alumni Magazine, and for College offices. His work involved portraiture, action and architectural photography that documented persons, events and structures at Oberlin College. He also made movies of football games, which were used for coaching and instructing football, and for the Alumni Association. In 1948 he made a movie prologue for the Mummer’s show, a theater group at the College. Princehorn’s photographs of the 1953 Hall Auditorium upon its completion, taken from a low-flying airplane, won a blue ribbon from the Professional Photographers’ Society of Ohio, of which he was its first member.
In 1932, A. E. Princehorn accompanied Oberlin Professor Clarence Ward to France where he took some 6,000 negatives of French medieval churches and cathedrals. A selection of prints from these were among the first photographs exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington; two were selected for display at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933-1934. The collection of negatives became the Clarence Ward Archive, presented to the National Gallery of Art in 1971. Ward was a distinguished professor of art history at Oberlin College, as well as the founder of the college's art library and the first director of the campus museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum. In addition to pursing his scholarly interests in Medieval French and American architecture, Ward was a practicing architect, who designed a number of buildings in the Oberlin community. Since Ward conducted his French photographic campaign in 1932, the resulting photographs by Princehorn provide vital documentation of many structures that were subsequently damaged during World War II.
In the 1966 photography contest of the American Public Relations Association Princehorn was runner-up for the title of “Photographer of the Year,” and in 1969 Princehorn won the American Colleges Public Relations Association special merit citation for a portrait of Bernard F. Tenney, Class of 1890, at the age of 100, and other portraits of notable persons taken at Oberlin such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., former ambassador Ralph Bunche, former U.S. Senator Wayne Morse and actor Charles Laughton. Many of the photographs were shown in “The Best of Pinky” exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum from May 28 to June 23, 1969 (Pinky was Princehorn’s nickname on the Oberlin campus).
Arthur E. Princehorn retired in 1969 and moved to Clearwater, Florida with his wife Mary Craig, who died in 1977. He died in Largo, Florida on November 22, 2001, survived by a daughter and a son, and two stepdaughters.
Sources Consulted
Oberlin College Archives
Princehorn negative log (RG 30/416).
Student file for Arthur Ludwig Princehorn (RG 28).
Oberlin Review, September 25, 1917, 3.
Obituary for Arthur Ludwig Princehorn, Oberlin Review, February 10, 1931.
Obituary for Glen M. Princehorn, Lorain Journal, January 12, 1940.
Oberlin Alumni Bulletin, First quarter, 1949.
Oberlin College Alumni Magazine, November 1955.
Clarence Ward, “The Best of ‘Pinky’”, Oberlin Alumni Magazine (May 1960): 12-13.
Oberlin College Alumni Magazine, August 1969, 23.
Oberlin News Tribune, May 15, 1969.
“A Portfolio of Photographs by A. L. Princehorn,” Hayes Historical Journal, III, No. 3 (Spring 1981).
Websites
Antiques Roadshow, Public Broadcasting Service, transcript of appraisal on June 25, 2005 of Arthur Ludwig Princehorn photographic materials, accessed October 14, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200502A07.html.
Larchmont and New Rochelle News, October 10, 2014, accessed October 14, 2014, http://larchmontandnewrochellenews.com/2014/10/10/glen-island-park-casino-new-rochelle-10805/
Clarence Ward Archive (National Gallery of Art, Department of Image Collections), Artstor Digital Library, accessed October 14, 2014, http://www.artstor.org/what-is-artstor/w-html/col-ward-national.shtml.
Author: Anne Cuyler Salsich Forms of Material (links to similar genres) Administrative InformationGlass plate negatives and sheet film negatives in accession 1978/6, which represents the bulk of the collection, were received from the Audiovisual Department in 1978. The Office of College Relations transferred the oversize prints from the “Best of Pinky” exhibit in 1980. The registrar at the Allen Memorial Art Museum transferred six prints by Arthur E. Princehorn in 1988. The photographs and captions by Arthur Ludwig Princehorn were found by the Oberlin Public Library and turned over to the College in 1989.
Christina Plyler-Wise, granddaughter of Arthur E. Princehorn, leant three photographs of Arthur L. Princehorn and family to the Archives for the purpose of having copy negatives made by a professional lab. These were digitally scanned and prints made in February 2015.
In 2002 a Princehorn family member donated the cameras, plaque and photographs of the father and son photographers. Accession 2012/065, from the Visual Resources Curator at the Art Department, included 19 mounted, vintage prints by Arthur E. Princehorn. All but two of these are 16 x 20 inches. It also included the list of prints in the Clarence Ward French Medieval Architecture Archive.
Four additional A. E. Princehorn prints were received from the Audiovisual Department in 2017 (accession 2017/027).
Photographic prints by the Princehorns other than those in this collection are located throughout the broad and voluminous Photographs record group and subgroups, usually without attribution. See 32/1 World War I Portraits; 32/2 Miscellaneous Photographs; 32/3 Graduates & Former Students, Presidents, Faculty, Staff and Others, and Class Albums; 32/4 Buildings; 32/5 Subjects; 32/7 Photograph Albums; 32/8 Hi-O-Hi Photographs; 32/10 Oversize Prints; and 32/11 Panorama and Rolled Photographs. Additionally Princehorn photographs appear in certain other record groups such as the Oberlin Country Day Camp Photographic Collection (RG 31/44). Glass plate negatives in RG 32/6 may include images by Arthur Ludwig Princehorn taken before 1917.
The negatives produced by Arthur Ewing Princehorn in 1932 of French medieval architecture for Oberlin College art historian Clarence Ward were gifted to the National Gallery of Art by Ward in 1971. This group, the Clarence Ward Archive at the National Gallery, comprises over 6,000 large format nitrate negatives, 4,000 of which can be viewed on ARTstor. The oversize prints in the Oberlin College Archives Princehorn Collection were made by Princehorn himself from those negatives.
See also the Clarence Ward Papers, 30/158.
For a 1927 black and white film that includes footage of Arthur Ludwig Princehorn shooting a panoramic all-college portrait, see RG 57 Moving Images, film #76.
The collection is arranged into the following series and subseries.
Series I. Photographs of the Princehorns and Ephemera,
1908, ca. 1910, ca. 1914-18, late 1920s, 1931,
ca. 1960s, ca. 1990s (0.2 l.f.)
Series II. Arthur Ludwig Princehorn Photographs, ca. 1900, 1925
(3.2 l.f.)
Series III. Arthur Ewing Princehorn Photographs, 1932, 1950s,
1960, 1964, n.d. (10.83 l.f.)
Subseries 1. Checklist of prints in Clarence Ward’s French
Medieval Architecture Archive (1 folder)
Subseries 2. Prints (10.83 l.f.)
Series IV. Negatives by A. L. and A. E. Princehorn, 1917-1966,
2014 (0.2 l.f.)
Series V. Objects, ca. 1923-28, ca. 1955, early 1960s, 1965
(0.83 l.f.)
Subseries 1. Cameras
Subseries 2. Plaques