1274
of their work, as well as of Lerebours’ Excursions Da-
guerriennes (1842–1843). It is likely that Shaw Smith
was exposed to photography from its beginnings, as the
new invention was announced in 1839 in the “Proceed-
ings of the Royal Irish Academy.” Possibly, he knew the
work by Scottish calotypists Captain Henry Brewster
(Sir David Brewster’s son), in Dublin in 1842, and John
Muir Wood, in Ireland in the late 1840s. The work of
Irish gentleman William Holland Furlong, correspond-
ing with Talbot in the early 1840s, might have also come
to his attention.
John Shaw Smith mastered the calotype process,
reading a paper about his modifi cation of Blanquart-
Evrard’s wet-paper process for use in hot and dry
climates, at the Dublin Photographic Society in April,
1857 (published in the Journal of the Photographic
Society on April 21, 1857, and in the Liverpool and
Manchester Photographic Journal, on May 15, 1857).
His modifi cation consisted in adding “bromure d’iode”
to the iodizing bath in preparation of the calotype
negative (using Whatman’s paper and, for higher
temperatures from 70 to 85 degrees, Canson’s paper).
The addition of “bromure d’iode” caused the time ex-
posure to be longer but allowed the paper to remain in
good condition for a whole day in high temperatures.
The paper was excited in the morning and developed
the same evening. The geography he toured along the
Mediterranean shores elicits comparison with similar
itineraries taken by Calvert Jones (1841, 1845–1846),
George Wilson Bridges (1846–1852), and the French
calotypists in Egypt, beginning with Maxime Du Camp
in 1851.
He photographed the monuments and sceneries of
Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, the Sinai peninsula, Pal-
estine, the ruins of Petra, Lebanon, Syria, Malta, and,
on his way back, Switzerland. He carefully documented
this trip, writing date and location on each negative,
organizing each group with geographical headings, and
keeping also a travel diary. After 1861, he printed his
calotype negatives of Egypt as albumen prints in a two-
volume album of seventy-two views with autograph text
pages. The photographs of Shaw Smith’s tour were not
published, and were exhibited only once in his lifetime,
in the photographic section at the Dublin International
Exhibition in 1865, together with works by Antoine
Claudet, Julia Margaret Cameron, O.G. Rejlander,
Thomas Annan, Francis Frith, Francis Bedford, where
Shaw Smith was awarded an honorable mention for
“good productions from paper negatives.”
The Grand Tour of John Shaw Smith began in Decem-
ber 1850 in Rome, where he made eighty-one photographs
(the largest group in his trip together with those made in
Egypt), which followed a preconceived iconography of
the Catholic-Roman capital, and sought for picturesque
sceneries along the Tiber River, and the surroundings of
Tivoli. He was one of the last amateurs who yielded to
the lure of Italy with the paper negative, and it is likely
that he gathered with the international group of artists and
photographers at the Caffe’ Greco. He continued the trip
south, reaching Naples and Pompeii, taking pictures of
the ruined landscape with the Vesuvius in the distance,
which echo Calvert Jones’ earlier calotypes as well as
Charles Dickens’ literary observations.
He traveled by steamboat between Naples and Ath-
ens, with a stop in Malta, quarantine station between
Europe and the Eastern countries. The photographs of
Athens reveal his political involvement with the roman-
tic fi gure of Lord Byron, searching for the house where
this hero lived and died during the Anglo-Greek war,
and looking for traces of British power over Greece. He
continued to Constantinople and Alexandria, stopping
in Smyrna, Cairo, and taking a boat-trip along the Nile.
He approached the Egyptian ruins in a similar way he
photographed the Roman sites, visiting the monument
in its architectural context and making progressive se-
quences that presented each structure and views from a
variety of perspectives.
Many photographs taken in the Eastern countries
(Petra, Jerusalem, Baalbec) recall his work in Ireland,
where ruins are enmeshed in a quiet and deserted land-
scape, with atmosphere of spiritual and natural decay.
The aesthetic rendering of the texture of the stones into
the fi bers of the paper negative reached its peak in the
records of the tombs of Petra, where he arrived as earli-
est calotypist in history. As for many early photographic
travels, the one by the Irish John Shaw Smith raises
questions about his own personal engagement with the
sites, his cultural and political background, and a grow-
ing tradition of organized itineraries, guidebooks, and
architectural documentation.
The whole extent of John Shaw Smith’s calotype
work (346 calotype negatives and 191 salted paper
prints) is conserved in two major photographic collec-
tions—the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
at the University of Texas at Austin (from the collec-
tion of Helmut Gernsheim) and the George Eastman
House in Rochester (from the collection of Alden Scott
Boyer)—and, in minor part, in the Photographic Society
of Ireland in Dublin.
Maria Antonella PelizzariBiography
John Shaw Smith is the only known Irish calotypist
who took an extensive trip along the Mediterranean,
in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, the Sinai peninsula,
Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Malta, and Switzerland, be-
tween 1850–1852. A smaller body of work documents
Irish Celtic ruins, and a trip to Paris. He was born in
Clonmuth, County Cork, South Ireland, on October 18,