Richard Keene
British photographer (1825–1894)

Richard Keene (15 May 1825 – December 1894) was an early Derbyshire photographer. He was a founding member of The Derby Photographic Society in 1884 and the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom in 1886 as well as being an early member of The Linked Ring.
Biography
Life
Keene was the son of Richard Keene and Priscilla Kimpton, born in London on 15 May 1825. At the age of three, Keene moved with his family to Derby when his father became the manager of Frost's Silk Mill. He was educated at Thomas Swanwick's Academy and then at Matthew Spencer's Academy in Derby before becoming an apprentice to Thomas Richardson & Sons, printers in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. He subsequently went to work in their London offices before working for Simpkin Marshall & Co publishers and booksellers. He married Mary Barrow in 1851 and had eight children in total, five sons (including the watercolourist Alfred John Keene) and 3 daughters, living in Radbourne Street, Derby. He died at his home in Derby in December 1894.
Career
In 1851 Keene returned to Derby from London to set up as a printer, publisher and bookseller in Irongate under the name Richard Keene and Co.
He had an early interest in photography and began taking and selling photographs of Derby and Derbyshire and before long photography became the mainstay of his business.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Richard Keene” as british photographer (1825–1894). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7327018. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1825, 1894, 1884 and 1886.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Keene” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.