Stanisław Julian Ostroróg

Count Stanisław Julian Ostroróg (January 1836 – 31 May 1890) was an exiled Polish nobleman and Crimean War veteran. He later became known as an early professional portrait photographer who created photogravures, under the professional name of ''Walery'', of many notable contemporaries, including Queen Alexandra of Denmark, Queen Victoria, Victor Hugo, and Sarah Bernhardt.

After his death, his brand, "Walery", was continued by his eldest son, Stanisław Julian Ignacy Ostroróg in London and Paris, sometimes also as "Lucien Walery" and a range of other related pseudonyms.

Early life

Count Stanisław Julian Ostroróg was born in Mohylew, Russian Empire (now Mogilev, Belarus) into the Polish nobility. There is uncertainty about his birth date that ranges between 1830 and 1836. The registration of his death at Brompton Cemetery records him as aged 54 years at time of death whereas his gravestone indicates he was 55 years old when he died on 31 May 1890. His family were involved in the 1830-31 November Uprising against the Russian Empire. The repression against insurgents that followed forced the Ostrorógs eventually to seek asylum abroad, and they may have temporarily joined the Great Emigration to France.

Young Stanisław decided upon a military career and was sent to train at the élite Page Corps academy in Saint Petersburg, Russia. From there he enlisted in the Imperial Guard, where he reached the rank of captain, serving in the Crimean War. During the war, he switched sides and joined the British army under General Storks. Eventually he found his way into the 5th Sultan's Cossacks—a Polish cavalry division—and became adjutant to the exiled General Władysław Zamoyski fighting alongside the British and Ottoman armies. He was made a colonel of the Ottoman army. There is a suggestion in Nadar's ''mémoire'' that Ostroróg began taking photographs during his time in the Crimean War, and he is said to have taken a Daguerreotype of Adam Mickiewicz on his deathbed in Istanbul in 1855.

After hostilities ended, Ostroróg settled for a while in London in 1856, and in 1862 he became a British citizen. He appears to have worked on improvements to a musical instrument, that he patented (or bought the patent from J-L Napoléon Fourneaux), called the "melodina", a hybrid piano and organ, which met with little success. His partner in the project, Szumlański, lost all his investment and the patent was sold on to '' Chappell & Co.'' That same year, he married the seventeen-year-old Teodozja Waleria Gwozdecka, from a landed Lithuanian family, with whom he had three surviving sons, the eldest of whom, born in 1863, was later to follow in his father's photographic footsteps. After the death in Warsaw of his infant son, Julian Alfred Stanisław (1865-1867), his next surviving son, Leon (1867-1932), who was born in Paris, became a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence and adviser to the Turkish government.

Photographic career

As a nine-year-old boy in Paris, Ostroróg is said to have met the distinguished physicist, astronomer and politician, François Arago (1786-1853), of the French Academie des Sciences who not only fired up his interest in optics and the new possibilities of photography, but whose request to the French government had resulted in its purchase of the discoveries of Jacques Daguerre (1787-1851) and Joseph Niepce (1765-1833) for public benefit and donated them to the "Grande Nation", thereby opening the technology to the wider world.

In the illustrated monthly photographic review, '' "Paris-Photographie"'', its founder-editor, Nadar, described Ostroróg senior thus:

A clever personality, an energetic, indefatigable business man, perpetually in motion, and most of all, appreciated for his cordiality and kindness. He has several talents, but it is photography that holds the greatest fascination for him.

He settled in Paris around 1857, after his stay in London, and tried his hand at poetry and publishing. When this met with scant success, he was back in London where he met and married his first wife and started a family. In 1864, adopting the sobriquet, "Walery" from his wife's name, "Waleria", Ostroróg set up his first photographic studio in Marseille, on the boulevard du Musée, that lasted till around 1870. He was a member of the ''Société française de photographie'', the French photographic society, between 1867 and 1885. In 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, he opened a studio in Paris in the rue de Londres. He immortalized such figures as, Gustave Eiffel, Ferdinand Lesseps, Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo. The collapse of the Société de l'Union Générale, his creditors, put him in financial difficulties and he was forced to rent out his atelier in rue de Londres from 1878. He moved to Nice

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