1108
purchase. Little research has been undertaken in the role
of such outlets. However, they played a signifi cant role
in the distribution of photographs of works of art at a re-
gional and particularly a local level. In parallel, purchas-
ing photographs of paintings from printed catalogues
remained common throughout the 19th century.
Some remarkable works were created using photo-
graphs of paintings. At the 1862 International Exhibi-
tion held in London, the Belgian photographer Edmond
Fierlants (1819–1869), was reported to have exhibited
two works, copies of orginals by Hans Memlinc (ca.1440–
1494); a life-size replica of the Shrine of St. Ursula, with
photographic reproductions of the painted panels (at £45),
and the Mystic Marriage of S. Catherine (at £12. 4s).
A wide variety of photographic print formats were
exploited for art reproduction during the 19th century.
These ranged from thumbnail-sized prints, used as bor-
der decoration in photo albums, to the large Elephant
format images of paintings in major European galleries
published in portfolios by Adolphe Braun et Cie. In
some instances a variety of different loose print sizes
were available of the same image. The carte de visite
from the 1850s and Cabinet from the 1860s were both
used to document a wide variety of works of art includ-
ing paintings. Paradoxically, examples of photographic
stereoscopic views of paintings are also known, though
given the two-dimensional nature of most paintings this
format seems particularly inappropriate.
The photographic lantern slide, one of the corner-
stones of the teaching of art history, was invented in
the late 1840s and was beginning to have a signifi cant
impact in the teaching of art in Germany by the end of
the 1870s. It was not until the 1960s that this format
was abandoned in favour of the 35mm slide. It is also
signifi cant that black-and-white photographic slides re-
mained predominant—particularly in German-speaking
countries, since there were widely held beliefs that the
“inaccuracy” of colour photography could distort the
reproduction of the original painting.
The use of photography for the illustration of art
books began in the 1840s and has proved to be one
of the most signifi cant applications of photographs of
works of art. Talbot’s Reading establishment printed the
photographic illustrations to William Stirling’s Annals
of the Artists of Spain published in 1848. Although as few
as 50 copies—25 each in quarto and octavo format—may
have been produced, the publication was doubly impor-
tant; fi rstly as the fi rst photographically illustrated art
history book and secondly that some of the illustrations
were photographs taken directly from the paintings they
represented, rather than manual intermediaries such as
engravings or lithographs. British publishers such as
Samson Low, Bell & Daldy, A.W. Bennett, Day & Son,
Seeley, Jackson & Halliday and Bickers & Son were
prominent as publishers of photographically illustrated
art books during the 19th century and several thousand
titles were published during this period. While many
of these photographically illustrated books contained
pasted in Albumen prints of paintings (or reproductions
after them), by the end of the century photomechanical
processes were almost exclusively used.
Though comparatively little appreciated in the 21st
century, the 19th century photography of paintings
formed a central position in the history of the medium
during that century. This was from an aesthetic, techni-
cal and market development perspective. The impact
on the history and study of painting is diffi cult to over
estimate.
Anthony J. Hamber
See also: South Kensington Museums; Photography
and Reproduction; and Daguerreotype.Further Reading
Hamber, A.J., ‘A Higher Branch of the Art’ Photographing the
Fine Arts in England 1839–1880, 1996.
Laura Boyer, La photographie de reproduction d’œuvres d’art
au XIXe siècle en France, 1839–1919, Thèse de doctorat en
Histoire de l’Art contemporain, Institut d’Histoire de l’Art,
Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, 2004.
Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Pho-
tographers in Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven and
London, 2001.PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE
The practice of drawing from sculpture—particularly
from ancient sculpture—was a central element in the
education of artists in Italy during the fi fteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Antiquities such as the Apollo Bel-
vedere, the Belvedere Torso, and the Laocoön—after
its rediscovery in January 1506—were fundamental to
the fi gurative vocabulary of every Renaissance artist.
Indeed, the study of sculpture complemented direct
study of the human fi gure, and, in the case of the female
fi gure, an antique Venus might serve as a surrogate for a
live model. Life drawing and the study of plaster casts
of sculpture remained at the core of every academic art
curriculum in Europe and in North America throughout
the early modern period.
Photography was presented as a new form of draw-
ing, and so it is not surprising that sculpture became
one of the primary categories of subject matter among
the English and French pioneers of the new art. Nor is
it surprising that plaster replicas of many of the works
that had been important to the formation of Renaissance
artists should also have had a formative infl uence on the
early history of photography. In the 1840s the Apollo
Belvedere and the Medici Venus were still considered
to represent the Greek ideal of male and female beauty.
Small-scale portable versions of these and other ancient