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The photography of painting was identifi ed as signifi -
cant by a wide range of infl uential photographers during
the 1840s and was strategically used to further the cause
of the revolutionary process. An album of Calotypes by
David Octavius Hill (1802–70) and Robert Adamson
(1821–48), presented to the Royal Academy of Arts in
London in c.1848 included a reproduction of a painting
entitled The Dance by William Etty (1787–1849).
However, the photography of paintings, like most
applications of photography, was to scale up very
signifi cantly from the early 1850s. While most 19th
century commercial photographers marketed them-
selves as generalists covering the general requirements
of their customers across Europe and beyond, some
created signifi cant reputations for art reproduction.
These included Fratelli Alinari of Florence, Adolph
Braun (1812–1877) of Dornach, Robert Macpherson
(1814–1872) and James Anderson (1813–1877) in
Rome, Leonida Caldesi (1823–1891) an Italian working
in London, Robert Bingham (1825–1870) the Parisian-
domiciled Englishman, and Juan Laurent (1816–c.1890)
and Charles Clifford (1819–1863) in Madrid; Hanfs-
taengl and F. Bruckmann in Munich; At the end of the
century Frederick Hollyer (1837–1933) was renowned
for his reproduction of paintings, particularly using the
Platinum print process.
By the 1850s all aspects of the commercial art world
including painters, sculptors, architects, engravers, art
dealers and auction houses had adopted photography.
The public sector in the form of museums also adopted
the medium and in some instances appointed photog-
raphers. Charles Thurston Thompson (1816–1868) was
one of the earliest of these and his career at the South
Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Muse-
um) during the 1850s and 1860s set an benchmark as he
recorded the permanent collections, temporary loan ex-
hibitions and ventured abroad to photograph in France,
Spain and Portugal. It is signifi cant that as early as the
1860s commercial photographers were complaining that
museum ‘in-house’ photographers –such as Thurston
Thompson—were given preferential treatment and were
being heavily subsidised by Government departments
that enabled them to undercut the prices at which they
sold photographs. In Thompson’s case this was largely
due to the sappers from the Royal Engineers that were
being used at South Kensington as part of the unoffi cial
yet permanent photographic facilities.
By 1880 the South Kensington Museum held a
collection of some 50,000 photographs acquired from
a variety of sources and channels all over the world.
Many of these were reproductions of paintings. Thomp-
son also undertook commercial work photographing
paintings on behalf of leading art dealers. In 1863 he
was employed by the art dealer Ernest Gambart (1814
–1902) on several occasions to photograph paintings
that he was selling. These included Shetland Ponies and
the Ferry Boat crossing the Lake in the Highlands by
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), and Derby Day by William
Powell Frith (1819–1909).
The photography of paintings was hindered by a
number of technical problems during much of the
19th century. Levels of illumination were particularly
critical. In the early 1840s Talbot had taken paintings
outdoors into the cloister at Lacock in order to enable
high enough levels of illumination for adequate camera
exposures to take place and this practice continued for
several decades. In 1858 the Raphael Cartoons were
taken outdoors from Hampton Court Palace to be pho-
tographed twice in parallel, once by Charles Thurston
Thompson and once by Leonida Caldesi. To the modern
observer the general views photographed of this work
being undertaken by Thompson and Caldesi are curious
since the paintings have been placed upside down. This
was to enable easier framing on the ground glass screen
of the camera—the image on a plate camera always
being vertically inverted from the actual view as seen
by the human eye.
Many paintings are hung in ways that make their
photography diffi cult or impossible. Paintings can be
hung high off the ground. They can be hung in corners
and thus have restricted illumination. In 1860 paintings
from the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace were
removed to the London photographic studio of Caldesi,
Blanford, & Co for photography to take place. From
the 1850s some public museums and galleries built
photographic studios to enable photography of paint-
ings to take place.
To counter the challenges of instances where paint-
ings could not be moved—such as wall frescoes—some
photographers built scaffolds to position the camera at
the paintings mid-point and thus remove any distortion.
The most signifi cant example of this was the use by
Adolphe Braun et Cie. Of a movable scaffold to pho-
tograph Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel
in Rome. These photographs, published in 1869 using
Swann’s Carbon print process and almost exclusively
of details the fresco scenes, had a major impact on the
study of these paintings and were greeted with universal
acclaim.
While the use of mirrors to refl ect light was known,
artifi cial light sources were very rarely exploited in the
photography of painting during most of the 19th century.
Artifi cial light sources were very rarely used in the pho-
tography of painting during most of the 19th century the
preference was for natural ‘North’ lighting in studios.
One particularly signifi cant early example of the use of
artifi cial lighting to photograph paintings took place in
the subterranean Early Christian Catacombs in Rome
during the late 1860s and 1870s where magnesium light
was used to illuminate the Early Christian fresco decora-