1491
See also: La Lumière; Courbet, Gustave; Blanquart-
Evrard, Louis-Désiré; Du Camp, Maxime; and
Mission Héliographique.
Further Reading
Beauge, Gilbert, “Un Monument de l’Archive Photographique:
La Lumière” in reprint of La Lumière, Paris: Jeanne Laffi tte,
1995.
Clark, T.J., Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution, London: Thames and Hudson, 1973
Francis Wey 1812–1882: Discours prononcés à ses funerailles,
bibliographie de ses oeuvres, Paris: 1882
Hermange, Emmanuel, “La Lumière et l’invention de la critique
photographique 1851–1860.” Etudes photographiques, vol.
1, no. 1 (November 1996): 89–108.
Janis, Eugenia Parry, and André Jammes, The Art of French Calo-
type, With a Critical Dictionary of Photographers, 1845–1870,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
La Mission héliographique, photographies de 1851, Paris: Ins-
pection générale des Musées classés et contrôlés, 1980.
Mirecourt, Eugène de, Francis Wey, Précédé d’une Lettre à
Eugène Sue, from the series Les Contemporains, Paris: Gus-
tave Havard, 1858.
Mondenard, Anne de, “La Mission héliographique: mythe et
histoire.” Études photographiques, 2 (May 1997): 60–81.
Schor, Naomi, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine,
New York: Methuen, 1987.
WHATMAN, JAMES & CO.
The Whatman’s Turkey Mill watermark, which appears
on many calotypes taken by Henry Fox Talbot and by
Hill and Adamson, and on cyanotypes by Anna Atkins,
dentifi es a paper that was produced by a long-established
manufacturer in Maidstone, Kent, England.
Turkey Mill, originally a fulling mill in which wool-
len fl eeces were washed before spinning, was built in
the 17th century, and was converted into a paper mill
in the 1730s by Richard Harris.
On Harris’s death, James Whatman, a tanner, mar-
ried Ann in August 1740, just a few years after Harris
had completed the mill conversion, and James and Ann
determined to make their paper mill the fi nest in the
country. At that time most of the fi nest papers for artists
were imported into Great Britain from France and the
Whatmans sought to change that.
James Whatman died in 1759, and his son, also
James, took over the mill in 1763 aged only 21. In the
following years, James introduced many innovations
in paper-making—including discoveries which lead
to improved whiteness in the papers—and built what
he called his ‘contrivance’ to make paper which he
named ‘antiquarian size’—more than 50 inches by 30
inches—the paper-making process requiring a team of
eleven men to operate it.
In the 1770s, James Jr. and his second wife took
in William Balston, and Balston became his protégé
and was groomed to become his successor. A stroke
caused James to pass the operation of his mills—three
by that time—to Balston, then 31, in 1890, and Balston
remained with the business after it was sold to local
businessmen in 1794.
In 1805 Balston left to form his own business, build-
ing a new mill at Springfi eld, and became the fi rst to
employ steam rather than water to power the processes
of paper-making.
The Whatman name remained with the original
company, and became enormously popular with artists
of the day—amongst them J. W. M. Turner, for whom
Whatman paper was a preferred choice claiming it gave
particular qualities to his watercolours.
After 1840 Whatman’s Turkey Mill paper also
became the fi rst choice of material for many pioneer
British photographers, and the dated Whatman water-
mark can be seen in a few negatives produced by early
calotypists, including Talbot, Hill & Adamson, Reverend
George Wilson Bridges, Calvert Richard Jones, John
Dillwyn Llewelyn and others.
Despite its popularity, however, Whatman’s Turkey
Mill paper was not ideally suited to photography. For a
start there was the distinctive watermark, which intruded
sometimes aggressively, into the composition. In the
early days, this does not seem to have been seen as a
serious problem, but later calotypes were made on paper
specially cut from larger sheets to avoid it. The sheets
bearing watermarks were retained for printing, where
the watermark did not present such a problem. The paper
had other drawbacks for photography as well—being
largely made from rags, it was not uncommon for it to
contain invisible traces of metal from buttons etc which
had been introduced during the manufacturing process.
While irrelevant in a writing paper, the chemical pro-
cesses through which the calotype paper was passed
caused those metal fragments to corrode and stain.
In 1857, an article in The Liverpool and Manchester
Photographic Journal (vol. 1, 214) recounts a visit to
see paper being made at “Hollingsworth’s, formerly
Whatman’s Turkey Mill” and offers singular praise for
the product stating that “the best paper ever made for the
Talbotype process was made at Turkey Mill” and that
“This paper was successfully used by the Rev. Calvert
Jones, about 1844, at Malta, in very hot weather, and
also in the East by the Rev. Mr. Bridges. It is strange
to relate that such paper has never been obtained since,
even from the same mill, and that is why I dwell so much
upon it at this moment. Could we get such a paper again,
with certainty the Talbotype would take a new start.”
Written at a time when the wet collodion process was
in its ascendancy, that is quite a statement!
After a series of mergers—starting with Houldsworth
and Balston in the early 1850s—the Whatman name was
revived in the 20th century, and the company continues