The Howard Coster photographs of Alfred Douglas
At the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Speaking of Alfred Douglas, as we were in the latest article about Three Times Tried, he came onto my radar recently during the festive period.
You may recall a minor kerfuffle last year about various errors in a label to an Oscar Wilde photograph at the National Portrait Gallery in London, that I highlighted and which were subsequently corrected. So perhaps to atone for that censure, I decided to visit the gallery’s online shop for gift-giving ideas.
I alighted upon four interesting and lesser-known images of the noble Lord—part of a collection of photographs taken in the 1940s by the renowned celebrity photographer Howard Coster.1
There was a problem, however.
It’s pedantic, I know, but didn’t somebody once say: we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously.
The online store has four of the Coster images of Lord Alfred Douglas for sale as prints, greetings cards, or downloadable for use under license.
Curiously however, and at the risk of trending a critique of the NPG which is not my intention, I was surprised to notice that all four of the Coster pictures of Douglas featured on their website are laterally-reversed—i.e. mirror images of what they should look like.
Here is how the images appear on the NPG website and in download:
Reverse Gear
The first indication that the pictures are the wrong way is the location of the breast pocket of Bosie’s jacket. From the wearer’s perspective it should be on the left—i.e. on the right as we look at it.
Any gentleman of fashion will tell you that the breast pocket is invariably on the left for men. Consequently, the traditional closing of a double breasted jacket—which should be left over right (the opposite for ladies)—also looks wrong in the photographs.
Boyish Looks
Another indication of reversal is the oval picture above the mantle that can be partially seen in the background of the fourth picture.
This is the Henry Richard Graves portrait of Douglas aged eight. A closer inspection shows that the portrait is facing the wrong way.
In the photograph it would appear that the young Bosie is looking to our left, whereas in Graves’s original artwork (which is no doubt the one hanging on the wall) he should be looking to our right (like the inset).
Parting Ways
It is also worth noting that it was Douglas’s lifetime practice to part his hair on the right, as all of the photographs below illustrate, and not on his left as the reversed NPG photographs would suggest.
I do not believe there is another picture of Douglas that shows him with a parting any other way than on his right (unless it has also been photographically flipped).2
Please Turn Over
Here is how the NPG images should appear:
It’s worth considering how the NPG reversal might have come about.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Most probably it was not done photographically. This would have meant either the film was loaded into the camera backwards, or that the negatives were placed incorrectly in the enlarger during printing. Both of these scenarios are unlikely with an experienced and professional photographer such as Howard Coster.
Moreover, out of the dozens of photographs of jacketed men taken by Coster that I have seen, no others make this error—they all have the breast pocket where it should be—on the jacket’s left, or the right as we look—and this includes others in the National Portrait Gallery’s own collection.
We won’t know precisely until someone looks at the original media—but it does seem likely to have occurred digitally when the photos (or negatives, see comments) were scanned and uploaded.
Unfortunately, this means that the NPG’s prints and downloads offered for sale on their website are of the reversed images.
© John Cooper, 2025.
Related:
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw44761/Lord-Alfred-Bruce-Douglas
Footnotes:
- In 1985 the National Portrait Gallery held an exhibition entitled ‘Howard Coster: Camera Portraits of the Twenties and Thirties’. In a book published in connection with the exhibition there is an appendix catalogue of all of Howard Coster’s work in the NPG collection which indicates 16 such poses of Alfred Douglas “sitting in the 1940s”.
↩︎ - And we can discount Jude Law in the film Wilde (1997) who also gets the parting wrong. ↩︎
The NPG website (not the shop pages) lists these photographs as being 35mm negatives, which explains the reversal.
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Meaning, I presume, an old-fashioned roll of film. Which bears out my theory that when they converted the negative to digital (there are several ways to do this such as in Lightbox Software), they apparently overlooked the need to invert the image.
Good Save!
Bravo!