Background
Malcolm Arbuthnot was born in 1874 in London, United Kingdom.
Malcolm Arbuthnot was born in 1874 in London, United Kingdom.
He was apprenticed to painter C. A. Brindley in Suffolk, England, and later studied painting under William Nicholson.
In 1912 Arbuthnot managed Kodak's Liverpool, England, branch, then maintained his own London studio from 1914 to 1926. Published often in London Illustrated News, he quit photography in 1930 to devote himself to painting.
He perfected a commercially successful gum process and marketed the Lentopigment paper in the early 1900s.
Called "the most advanced of the modems" in a 1909 Amateur Photographer, Arbuthnot's early interest in the pigment processes led him to create some remarkable gum and oil prints. Aside from commercial portraiture, his subjects were often entertainers. Most of his negatives were destroyed in a fire during World War I.
The artist belonged to The Linked Ring (1907), Photographic Society of Liverpool (ca. 1912), Royal Society of Arts (1939) and Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors (1944).
His wife was a Kodak heiress.