William H. Rau

b. 1855 — d. 1920

William H. Rau American, 1855-1920 William Herman Rau was a Philadelphian with close ties to that city's photographic activities. The son of photographer George Rau, William married Louise Bell, daughter of photographer William Bell. He had worked for Bell until purchasing his father-in-law's company in 1878. Louise Bell Rau later exhibited her own work in pictorialist circles. Among Rau's other associates were his brother George, with whom he opened a photographic studio in 1885, the well-known photographic publisher Edward L. Wilson, and John Moran, brother of landscape artist Thomas Moran. In 1874 Rau had joined an international expedition to the South Seas to photograph the transit of Venus, working with John Moran on the project. He then worked intermittently in the southwest United States, including a period with William Henry Jackson. In 1881 he accompanied Edward Wilson to Egypt, where he made an extensive set of stereoviews and possibly some larger prints, although these have never been identified. He worked in Philadelphia during the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and was later the official photographer for the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland. Best known for his railroad and landscape images, Rau was hired in 1890 by the Pennsylvania Railroad and in 1899 by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, for which he produced a series of views from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. He also recorded the Johnstown flood and the 1904 Baltimore fire. Today, Rau is important for his position linking, through subject and style, key aspects of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. T.W.F.