15 Facts About Bertram Park

Bertram Charles Percival Park was an English portrait photographer whose work included British and European royalty.

Bertram Park was an expert in the cultivation of the rose and the editor of The Rose Annual.

Bertram Charles Percival Park was born in either Bloomsbury or Marylebone to Charles Percival Park and Katharine Mary Park and baptised at Minster, Kent, England, in 1883.

Bertram Park initially worked in the family firm which made artist's materials.

In 1916, Park married the photographer Yvonne Gregory at Hampstead, and she became one of his principal models.

In 1910, Bertram Park was one of the founders of the London Salon of Photography.

Bertram Park's work included British and European royalty and in 1927 he was made an MBE.

Bertram Park's images were widely used on British and British Commonwealth postage stamps, currency, and other official documents in the 1930s.

Bertram Park's photograph was in black and white so Sickert was obliged to add colour to the painting he used a restricted palette causing the critic Frank Rutter to describe the work as "practically a monochrome".

Bertram Park produced a number of photographic books featuring the female nude and supplied photographs to naturist publications.

Outside photography, Bertram Park was a Commandant in the Metropolitan Special Constabulary and was noted as such in 1927 and 1939.

Bertram Park was an expert on the cultivation of the rose about which he wrote many books.

Bertram Park was the editor of The Rose Annual and in 1957 a review in the American Institute of Biological Sciences described his The Guide to Roses, for which he provided the photographs, as "the last word on roses".

In later life, Bertram Park lived in Pinner, Middlesex, in a house whose grounds he used as a setting for his photography.

In 1984, his daughter June presented the National Post Museum with an album of 25 pages that Bertram Park had created in the late 1940s of his photographs and the stamps based upon them.