1387
lections including the Royal Collection and the Louvre.
Thompson was an active organiser and exhibitor of the
Photographic Society throughout the 1850s and early
1860s. In 1866, at the direction of the Museum, Thomp-
son left on a tour of Portugal and Spain and produced
fi ne architectural photographs, among them views of the
Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella, Spain. Late in
1867 he stayed in Paris to assist with the photographic
section of the international exhibition. While there he
suffered severe attacks of jaundice and died on 20 Janu-
ary 1868 aged fi fty-two.
See also: Wet Collodion Negative; Cole, Sir Henry;
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All
Nations, Crystal Palace, Hyde Park (1851); South
Kensington Museums.
Further Reading
British Sessional Papers, 1860, vol.XVI, 527 ff, Report from the
Select Committee on the South Kensington Museum.
Fontanella, Lee, Thurston Thompson, Xunta De Galicia, Spain:
1996.
Hamber, Anthony, A Higher Branch of the Art: Photographing
the Fine arts in England, 1839–1880, London: Gordon and
Breach Publishers, 1996.
Haworth-Booth, Mark, Photography: An Independent Art. Pho-
tographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1839–1996,
Victoria and Albert Museum/Princeton University, 1997.
Haworth-Booth, Mark, and McCauley, Anne, The Museum and
the Photograph: Collecting Photography at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, 1853–1900. Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute, 1998.
Physick, John, Photography and the South Kensington Museum,
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Offi ce, 1975.
THOMS, WILLIAM JOHN (1803–1885)
The writer William John Thoms was born in Westmin-
ster, London, and initially trained as a clerk, working for
over twenty years at Chelsea Hospital before moving to
the House of Lords as Clerk around 1845. He eventually
held the post of Deputy Librarian there from 1863 until
his retirement.
In addition to his clerical posts, Thoms was a prolifi c
writer, and in 1849, founded the subsequently infl uen-
tial journal Notes & Queries. The journal fi rst carried
an essay on photography in September 1852, and in
the following issue, Thoms explained his decision to
include the new art:
The shadow of a doubt that we once felt as to the pro-
priety of introducing the subject of Photography into
our columns, has been entirely removed by the many
expressions of satisfaction at our having done so which
have reached us.and thus embarked on an engagement with the medium
which continued for many years. Amongst his early
contributors were Dr Hugh Diamond, who would later
edit the Journal; of the Photographic Society and George
Shadbolt, later editor of The Liverpool & Manchester
Photographic Journal. Thoms, himself a keen amateur
photographer, continued to edit Notes & Queries until
1872.
In the wider world of literature he is remembered for
his 1879 book The Longevity of Man: Its facts and Its
Fictions (London: F Northgate) and for the invention
of the word ‘folklore’ in 1846.
John HannavyTHOMSON, JOHN (1837–1921)
John Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1837. While
little is known of his early years, the intellectual
breadth of his writings suggests that Thomson was well
educated. He was a versatile photographer whose work
ranged from portraiture, landscape and architecture to
studies of urban life. Thomson was a keen observer of
his various subjects, a skill that led him well beyond the
conventions of travel photography.
Thomson traveled to Asia in 1862, at the age of
twenty-fi ve, settling fi rst on the island of Penang in
Malaysia. With brief interruptions, Thomson lived in
Asia for the next decade, photographing in Siam, Viet
Nam, Cambodia, Formosa, and vast stretches of China.
It is diffi cult to overstate the challenges that Thomson
confronted during his travels in Asia. Traveling with the
paraphernalia involved in the wet collodion process was
arduous, what with the weight and fragility of the cam-
eras, lenses, glass plates, chemicals, trays, and material
suffi cient to make portable darkrooms. He transported
himself and his equipment to high mountain ranges,
jungles, swamps, and the upper reaches of the Yangtze
River. But just as formidable were the challenges of
negotiating different languages and cultures. Thomson
must have been a man of considerable charm and per-
suasion, since he repetitively connected with powerful,
well-placed people in these countries who sat for his
portraits and then enabled him to gain access to other
people and remote areas. The King of Siam, for example,
provided support for Thomson to photograph, for the
fi rst time, the extraordinary ruins at Angkor Wat.
Thomson was not immune from ethnocentrism and
cultural bias in his images and writing, but in the main
he expressed a genuine respect for native customs, and
he took evident pleasure in explaining these differences
to his European readers. When traveling, Thomson
took extensive notes which he later used for the essays
he published along side his photographs, in which he
explained in considerable detail a wide range of local
customs. On occasion he made pointed comments about
how Europeans could learn could learn from the com-
parisons. When writing about Cantonese merchants, for