OLIVE EDIS

(1876-1955)

Olive Edis opened her first studio with her sister Katherine in the early 1900s in Sheringham, Norfolk specialising in fisherman and local nobilities. Edis worked with sepia platinotypes and pioneered colour autochrome portraits from 1912 onwards. Her sitters included George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930) and Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928). Olive Edis patented her own autochrome viewer and she photographed the British Women's Services and the 1918/1919 battlefields of France and Flanders for the Imperial War Museum.