James Valentine (1815-1879) was a famous photographer and publisher. His father, John, set up a company of printers and lithographers, based in Dundee in 1825. Valentine trained as an engraver, but went to Paris to learn the Daguerreotype photographic process in the late 1840s and returned to Dundee to open a portrait studio in early 1850s, specialising in cartes-de-visite. The following decade, the Valentine company entered the photographic publishing business.
The Valentine Company is well known for adding and removing features from their negatives in order to keep them commercial.
In 1851 James Valentine (1815 - 1879) added portrait photography to the activities of his established Dundee business, which had been based previously on the engraving, printing and supply of business stationery. Embracing landscape photography in the early 1860s, by the 1930s the company had become one of the world's largest publishers of picture postcards.
Its activities spanned the whole of the United Kingdom, Eire, much of Europe, and many other parts of the world. Although it is mostly British and Irish subjects which have survived, there are nonetheless some images of, for example, New Zealand and Canada within the collection. Valentines had a policy of discarding obsolete negatives, and so of the estimated 1,000,000 images which might have been in the collection, only about 120,000 survive.
Valentine was a proficient landscape photographer who became one of the seven original members Edinburgh Photographic Society in 1861. Around the same time, the Valentine company entered the photographic publishing business and became known for their postcards. Valentine and his company systematically photographed the vistas and attractions of Britain for use in these postcards.
The company continued to operate in Dundee, as a publisher of greetings cards, until it was taken over by a competitor in 1979 and then again by the American Greetings Corporation (Ohio, USA), the world's largest publicly owned greeting card company. The factory in Dundee has subsequently been closed.
There are a great number of Valentine postcards of Scottish Landmarks in and around Stirling. Some of these include the castle, the Wallace Monument, The Stirlings of Keir, Kippendavie, Garden and Kippenross houses, and many, many others. We will continue to document and add to our collection of his famous photographs here.
In the Stirling Castle Section of the Clan Stirling Online Library are a number of examples of Valentine's work and craftmanship. Below is an example of his work, this image is of the Robert The Bruce memorial at Stirling Castle. It is number 7726.
