Bidspirit auction | 20th Century Whyte Inverness Original

20th Century Whyte Inverness Original Photo - The Big Freeze, Inverness - A black-and-white silver gelatin print depicting two men amidst a landscape of pack ice. The photo shows the Beauly Firth from Bunchrew House (now Bunchrew House Hotel) - c 1895. The firth is frozen solid with two Highlanders standing on it during the Great Freeze of 1894-1895. There is a copy of the photo in the Am Baile Archive. During the severe Great Freeze of the 1894–95 winter, temperatures in the wider Scottish Highlands dropped as low as −18 °C (0 °F) in January 1895, while the UK record low was set at −27.2 °C (−17 °F) further south in Braemar on February 11, 1895, though specific official city-centre minimum temperature station records for Inverness itself during this exact peak remain unquantified beyond general Highland severe frost severity The photograph shows one man standing with a long staff and another seated, wearing a traditional Scottish bonnet, positioned atop jagged ice floes against a coastal background. The composition captured in monochrome tones shows the textures of the broken ice under a cloudy sky. The print is professionally mounted on a heavy cream card stock within a black-bordered window mat. The lower right corner of the mount features a blind stamp applied to the card stock. It consists of two lines of impressed capital letters reading WHYTE on the top line and INVERNESS on the bottom line. The photograph is housed in a large, stepped gilt wood frame.