Page 13 - Bulletin 7 2003

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still be around, but where? Elliott seldom tells us, but he did leave us his
photographs, for which small mercy we should be grateful.

Arthur Elliott as an architectural recorder

With well over two thousand photographs, architecture, next to pictorial Africana, is
the best represented of all Elliott’s interests. More important, it is the subject in

which his recording activities have been most valuable of all. There are two reasons
for this: firstly, whereas most of the documents, pictorial Africana, even furniture

Elliott photographed are all likely still to exist, this is unfortunately not the case with
the architecture – and certainly not with the architectural environment as a totality;

and secondly, Elliott was at his most thorough when it came to recording the old

buildings of such a vast area. That this was Elliott’s forte was increasingly realised
even during his time, for while his first exhibitions contained only a minority of

architectural photographs, his last one, ‘The cape, quaint and beautiful’, in 1938, was

almost entirely devoted to architecture.

The following figures may show to what extent Elliott covered the field when
compared with his contemporaries. When one takes as a basis the farmhouses or

major townhouses of before c. 1840 still standing today in the area where the ‘Cape
Dutch’ style occurs (probably close to one thousand), there are Elliott photographs of

about 250 – not including almost as many old buildings he recorded that are no

longer there. Alys Fane Trotter, the only major author on the subject before Elliott
came onto the scene, described fewer than one hundred; Dorothea Fairbridge, during

Elliott’s time, well over one a hundred. Only thirty-five are included in Pearse’s book
(though well described and depicted). De Bosdari, nearly twenty years after Elliott’s

death, produced the most thorough survey up to then, but the slightly over two
hundred buildings he described did not exceed the number Elliott had photographed.

Not all of Elliott’s architectural photographs are of historic buildings. There are long
and rather tedious series of the new University buildings, Groote Schuur Hospital

and several commercial buildings, as well as somewhat more attractive studies of