Captain John Downes Rochfort

A carte-de-visite portrait of Captain John Downes Rochfort (1826-1885).

John Downes Rochfort was the second son Colonel John Staunton Rochfort, M.P., of Clogrenane, County Carlow, Ireland.

He appears on the 1851 census, a barrister-at-law visiting Sir John Hayford Thorold at Lyston Hall in Lincolnshire. At the time of the 1851 census he was 26 years old, so he would have been 40 when he visited Silvy’s studio. He was born in County Carlow, Ireland.

According to Hart’s Army List (1860), he was a Captain in the 2nd Royal Lancashire Militia, which was based in Liverpool.

Between 4 September and 27 November 1867, he made a tour of Canada and the United States, during which he compiled an important album of photographs. While in the United States, Rochfort visited all the major American Civil War sites and purchased many photographs relating to the war, photographs which have since become some of the best known images of the conflict.

According to a short report in Jackson’s Oxford Journal (30 May 1885), John Downes Rochfort, Esq. of Sidmouth Lodge, Bolton-gardens, London, and Bawnboy and Lisnagree, County Westmeath, died in Paris on 24 May 1885. He was 59 years old.

Photographed on 4 December 1865 by Camille Silvy of London.