575
toning silver chloride prints: gold toning was relatively
expensive, and platinum was one-third of the price of
gold. In 1889, Lyonel Clark improved the toner by sub-
stituting potassium chloroplatinite. Platinum gave rich
black tones to manufactured papers and was employed
from about 1895 until the early 1920s, sometimes com-
bined with palladium (particularly for homemade chlo-
ride papers). In the 1890s, uranium nitrate toning was
used for purple to red-brown colours, ferric ammonium
citrate for browns, and traditional thiocyanogen or gold
chloride for a violet-black hue. Other toning compounds
included copper (for red), iron salts (Prussian blue), and
vanadium (green). Sepia toning with sodium sulphide
was not adopted until the early 1900s.
Silver gelatine papers show oxidative-reductive ‘tar-
nishing’ from acids (from handling or airborne pollut-
ants), and staining and sulphiding from residual fi xing
chemicals. The gelatine can display moisture damage,
evident in dull patches on the print surface, spots of
mould, and delamination of the gelatin binder.
Hope Kingsley
See also: Bromide Prints; Eder, Joseph Maria;
Enlarging and Reducing; Eastman, George; Maddox,
Richard Leach; Platinotype Co. (Willis & Clements);
and Warnerke, Leon.
Further Reading
The Cyclopedia of Photography, edited by Bernard E. Jones,
London: Waverly Book Company, 1911.
Eder, Josef Maria, History of Photography, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1905, 1932, 1945.
Glafkidès, Pierre, Photographic Chemistry, vol. 2, London:
Fountain Press, 1958.
Ilford Manual of Photography, edited by C. H. Bothamley, Lon-
don: Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1891.
Nadeau, Luis, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic, and
Photomechanical Processes, vols. 1 and 2, New Brunswick,
Canada: Atelier Luis Nadeau, 1990.
Reilly, James M., Care and Identifi cation of 19th Century Photo-
graphic Prints, Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Co., 1986.
GENRE
As a category of subject matter in painting, genre refers
to incidental scenes of everyday life. In photography,
the term further suggests the artifi cial re-creation of
such scenes for the camera (rather than the more direct
recording of actual subject matter as in documentary or
snapshot photography). Often associated with Victorian
art photography, genre photography typically involves
the staging of a narrative tableau, using paid or amateur
models to enact familiar themes.
From the French for kind or variety, the word genre
fi rst designated the various kinds, or genres, of paint-
ing subordinate to grand manner history painting in the
eighteenth-century academic hierarchy (such as land-
scape and still life), before acquiring its more restricted
meaning in the 1790s (Stechow and Comer, 1975–6, 90).
The terms high and low genre are sometimes used to
distinguish between scenes of bourgeois life and peasant
life. The initial popularity of such everyday themes in
the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic can
be linked to the appearance of a moneyed merchant
class, which in its painting preferred humble images of
daily existence with subtle moral overtones to courtly
or religious display.
In the decades prior to photography’s invention, in-
terest in genre painting surged internationally, spurred
by the Enlightenment and industrialization. Reputa-
tions of Dutch seventeenth-century and French eigh-
teenth-century painters previously deemed minor rose
dramatically, and pictures of ordinary subject matter
were collected widely, infl uencing trends in nineteenth-
century painting up to and including impressionism. For
example, the Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie mod-
eled his work of the early nineteenth century on Dutch
and Flemish seventeenth-century painters of peasant
scenes such as Adriaen van Ostade and David Teniers
the Younger. For early photographers, conventional
genre subjects in painting similarly offered a source of
recognizably “artistic” or “picturesque” images, while
avoiding the pitfalls of more lofty subjects such as moral
allegory, which, many critics argued, went beyond the
proper scope of photography. Exemplifi ed by the work
of Henry Peach Robinson, who hired models to portray
rustic farm workers, such scenes of everyday life in
nineteenth-century photography could be elaborately
constructed affairs. Made deliberately to achieve ar-
tistic effect, genre photographs were thus enmeshed in
confl icting, and shifting, aesthetic debates about both
painting and photography.
Though he did not use the term, William Henry Fox
Talbot clearly referred to genre painting in his 1844
Pencil of Nature with his image entitled The Open
Door (Plate VI). A self-consciously artistic study of
light and texture, it shows a rustic cottage door with
a bristle broom poised diagonally in the foreground.
In the adjacent text, Talbot declared, “We have suffi -
cient authority in the Dutch school of art, for taking as
subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar
occurrence” (Talbot, 1969). Talbot here linked the in-
cipient art of photography with contemporary esteem
for Dutch painting while, visually, borrowing the motif
of the broom, propped precariously at an angle, directly
from seventeenth-century works by Pieter de Hooch and
others (Chiarenza, 1975, 24).
Other early calotypists enacted scenes “from life”
modeled on Dutch and other genre paintings. David
Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s Edinburgh Ale
(1843–46), remarkable for the seemingly animated