Coconut Palms

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Artist: William Louis Henry Skeen & Co. (British, 1862–1903)
Medium: Albumen print on thin, smooth, cream wove paper
Size: Image: 10 1/2 × 8 1/8 inches (26.7 × 20.6 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

By the 1870s, commercial photography studios proliferated across the British colonies, selling prints to bureaucrats, businesspeople, and tourists alike. In Colombo, then part of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), William Louis Henry Skeen ran one of the colony’s most commercially successful photography studios. Each photograph in this series focuses on a single species of tree, emphasizing its form, scale, and beauty within the landscape. Made during a period of colonial rule, some images include local people, whose small size foregrounds the trees’ monumentality. Their presence—shaped by the photographer’s artistic and commercial aims—reflects the unequal power dynamics at the time.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.