1057
Plateros location in Lima during a time the city was
experiencing extensive population growth and economic
change. This period also brought about more photo-
graphic competition. Pease moved his studio sometime
around 1859 to a street level location, 182 Plateros,
the same building in which Emilio Garreaud had his
studio. Historian Keith McElroy, who has complied
extensive biographical information on Pease, character-
ized Pease’s daguerreotypes as “straightforward studio
portraits... [that] meet high standards, and he served a
distinguished clientele, including presidents, intellectu-
als, and socialites.”
In order to compete in the burgeoning photographic
community, in addition to his daguerreotypes, Pease
began to offer the public ambrotypes, various kinds of
hand painted images, and photographs on paper. By all
accounts he remained successful. But this success was
eventually overshadowed by yet another technological
advancement, the carte-de-visite. In the summer of
1856 Benjamin Pease and his family left for Europe.
The control of his studio was left to D. David Vargas
and D. Fuljencio M. de Urgarte.
Benjamin Franklin Pease returned to Peru ten years
later and operated an establishment that made and sold
shoes, sewing machines, and other items. He died in
Pisco, Peru, in 1888.
Michele M. Penhall
PECK, SAMUEL (active 1840s–1850s)
American inventor and photographer
Samuel Peck was instrumental in the introduction and
initial development of the thermoplastic union case in
the early 1850s, and thus responsible for the fi rst ap-
plication of molded plastic to photography.
After spending his early years as a grocer, Peck is
listed as an early daguerreotypist operating a studio
in New Haven, Connecticut, from the mid 1840s until
early 1852, by which time he was also making leather
daguerreotype cases, probably in partnership with the
Scovill Manufacturing Company. His fi rst patent, is-
sued in April 1850, was for an improved holder for
daguerreotype plates during buffi ng.
Peck’s fi rst patent for a thermoplastic composition
case (US Patent 11,758) was issued on October 3, 1854,
and by the following year, the partnership with Scovill
had been formalised into a new company known as
Samuel Peck & Co.
Over the following six years, Peck’s company, along
with rivals A P Critchlow, and Littlefi eld, Parsons &
Co., was highly infl uential in the popularisation of the
thermoplastic case. Peck, however, is believed to have
left the company in 1857.
His engagement with photography and case-making
was relatively short-lived, and he developed further
careers, fi rst as a music-hall proprietor, and then as an
undertaker.
He is believed to have died c.1879.
John HannavyPENCIL OF NATURE, THE
Despite its limited initial audience, The Pencil of Nature
was an epoch-making publication, both technically and
aesthetically. Published in six instalments between 1844
and 1846 by William Henry Fox Talbot, it was a luxu-
rious work that constituted the fi rst true photographic
book, incorporating in quarto format a total of twenty-
four pasted-in original calotype prints (whereas earlier,
daguerreotype-based publications had used engraved
reproductions), and setting a model for later similar
productions by Talbot and others. The subjects ranged
from artwork to houseware, scenes in Talbot’s Lacock
Abbey estate, and English monuments. The prints,
of various sizes, were produced at Talbot’s Reading
Establishment by Nicolaas Henneman and assistants,
and pasted in along with a frontispiece, prefatory notes
including a “brief historical sketch of the invention of
the art,” picture titles and lengthy captions in ornate
type. The Pencil of Nature was sold by subscription,
the price of instalments varying with the number of
prints (from twenty-one shillings for Part II with seven
prints, to seven shillings six pence for three prints in the
last parts). Although nearly three hundred copies were
produced of the fi rst instalment, interest later dropped
and fewer than one hundred were made of the last one.
This small printing—a paradox for a book considered
to be an ancestor of mass illustration—accounts for
the rarity of extant full sets, fortunately supplemented
by facsimile editions. Despite its limited circulation,
however, the Pencil of Nature achieved Talbot’s goal of
illustrating his invention of a “new art”—an art indeed
so novel that Talbot had to warn readers that the plates
were produced “by the mere action of Light.” It was not
only a technical feat, but an ambitious attempt at giving
artistic and aesthetic status to the calotype and, more
generally, photography. Many of the pictures refl ected a
heritage of fi ne arts, and the caption for Plate VI, “The
Open Door,” explicitly linked its “common” subject—a
barn door with tools on either side—to “the Dutch
school of art.” Thus, the Pencil of Nature almost single-
handedly created the pictorial tradition in photography.
This artistic bend, however, went beyond a generic
affi liation with the fi ne arts, and the caption for Plate
VI, as others in the book, should not be read as mere
prophecy. More fundamentally, the Pencil of Nature
enacted an aesthetics and practice of photography that