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Historical Photographs, Nashville: American Association of
State and Local History, 1977.
Whitaker, Robert, A Freeman of the Frontier- The Story of a
Modern Ministry... An account of the life of Dr. John T. Gu-
lick Missionary, Scientist, and Sociologist. Typed manuscript
by Gulick’s brother-in-law, n.d., Mission Houses Museum
Library, Honolulu, Hawai`i.
WEY, FRANCIS (1812–1882)
French writer and critic
Francis Wey arrived in Paris from his native Franche-
Comté in 1830 to prepare for a life of business at the
Ecole des Arts et Manufactures. In 1832 he left his
studies to become a writer. He began penning essays
on Romantic topics such as the Abbey of Noirmoutiers,
for journals such as L’Artiste. In the long career that
followed, Wey covered almost every mode of writing
available to an ambitious Parisian in the nineteenth
century.
Around 1833, Wey came under the protection of
Charles Nodier, fellow Franc-Comtois and friend of
the Wey family. Nodier introduced Wey into the literary
circle which gathered around him at the Bibliothèque de
l’Arsenal; there the young writer encountered most of
the major and lesser lights of the Parisian literary scene.
In 1834, perhaps on the recommendation of Nodier,
Wey entered the Ecole Royale des Chartes. Thereafter
his writing was facilitated (and often generated) by his
secure career as an archivist. He published novels, tales,
and travel narratives, but also erudite studies of the
French language, articles on history and archaeology,
and literary and art criticism.
In 1851 Wey wrote often for the new photographic
journal La Lumière. His involvement with the magazine
ended with its dissolution and reformulation at the end
of the year. In 1853 he wrote an essay on the history
of photography for Le Musée des familles; he did not
write about photography again. Wey’s attention to the
medium lasted little more than a year, and went unre-
marked by his biographers and bibliographers. Yet his
twenty-three articles on various photographic matters
constitute an early and self-conscious formulation of the
terms for photographic criticism. His suggestions for
photographic subjects and projects were taken seriously
by his peers. And his critical project was infl ected by
his devotion to Realist and Naturalist painting, and his
friendship with Gustave Courbet, another Franc-Com-
tois. Their alliance was perhaps at its height in 1851,
the year Courbet’s portrait of Wey was hanging in the
Salon along with The Stonebreakers and A Burial at
Ornans, among other works.
Wey wrote technical, scientifi c and historical articles
for La Lumière, but the themes of his photographic
criticism emerge in his reviews and his writing about
art. Above all Wey wanted to elucidate photography’s
relationship to painting and printmaking, and to identify
subjects and genres for which photography was well-
suited. The clearest statement of his ideas appears in
one of his last articles, “Photographes et Lithographes”
(Photographers and Lithographers), which appeared
on 19 September:
Art has already exercised a very notable infl uence
on photography. It has taught it the science of effects,
the manner of composing a picture, and diverse proce-
dures for elevating itself, in its literal interpretation of
nature, to the impression that results from the sentiment
for color.
Wey was sympathetic to photography that took its
cues from painting by the coloristes—whether the
recent fl owering of landscape, which he saw as one of
the most important artistic developments of the day, or
portraits by old masters such as van Dyck and Titian,
who achieved pictorial unity through atmosphere and
judicious use of highlights. In a 17 August review of
photographic publications Wey praised the lines in
calotype photography, “which leave the leading role to
effect and the modeling of planes.” So photography of-
fered proof of color’s dominance over line. But although
photography was to follow painting’s paradigm, it was
only in order to establish one of its own. Further into
“Photographes et Lithographes” Wey enumerates sub-
jects for which photography is the superior medium to
painting, engraving, or lithography: “Subjects swarming
with details, monuments loaded with arabesques, the
crossroads of old neighborhoods, birds-eye views of the
great cities put [photography] above all rivalry.” What
is more, Wey fi nds photography capable of effects that
would in turn nourish painting:We have watched landscapists in admiration before prints
taken in winter forests, prints whose planes had been
formed from a prodigious tangle of bare brambles, boughs,
tree trunks, bristling patches of grass, and small branches.
We have watched painters contemplate, amazed, certain
effects that were reputed almost unattainable, yet which
were rendered by photography with a clarity, a simplicity
of means which art had not imagined.Wey had introduced some of these ideas in his fi rst
article for La Lumière, “Sur l’infl uence de l’héliographie
sur les beaux-arts” [On the Infl uence of Photography on
the Fine Arts], and he developed them in other essays—
”Du naturalisme dans l’art: de son principe et de ses
conséquences” (On Naturalism in Art: Its Principle and
Its Consequences), “Théorie du portrait” (Theory of the
Portrait), “Album de la Société héliographique” (Album
of the Heliographic Society). He repeatedly claimed
that photography would “renew” painting through the
fresh relationships it recorded in studies of landscape,
the nude, and drapery. He also somewhat teasingly used