This exhibition represents just some of the wonderful Cavaye Collection of glass negatives by Thomas Begbie. The collection was discovered in a house in St James' Square in 1950, and is currently held at the City Art Centre. They cover a wide range of subjects, most notably Edinburgh's Old Town, but also the coastal communities of Leith, Granton and Newhaven and further afield such as Roslin and Stirling.
Thomas Begbie was born in 1840 at St James' Square, Edinburgh. Both his father and grandfather were lapidaries, and Begbie apprenticed to the trade as a young man. He took up photography in an amateur capacity from the late 1850's, and joined the Edinburgh Photographic Society in 1867. Begbie appeared in trade directories from 1874, advertising himself as a professional photographer from 1879-1881. He died in 1915.
The image library for the collections of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums and Galleries