1482
century practiced the waxed paper negative. In France,
Charles Negre (1820–1880) and Henri Le Secq (1818–
1882) followed Le Gray from painting to photography.
Victor Prevost (1820–1881) was also trained by Le Gray
and traveled to New York. In England, Roger Fenton
(1819–1869) was a key photographer in the development
of the process, and the young American John Beasley
Greene, distinguished himself ca 1856.
Le Gray practiced the wet collodion and waxed
paper processes side-by-side throughout much of his
photographic career, but by the 1870’s he and the rest
of the photographic community had completely turned
to glass plate photography.
Lee Ann Daffner
See also: Calotype and Talbotype; and
Daguerreotype.
Further Reading
Brettell, Richard, and Roy Flukinger et al., Paper and Light: the
Calotype in France and Great Britain, 1839–1870. London:
David Godine, 1984.
Crookes, William, A Handbook on the Waxed Paper Process.
Great Britain: Crookes, 1857.
Delamotte, Philip Henry, The Practice of Photography: A Manual
for Students and Amateurs. London: Joseph Cundell, 1853.
Jammes, A. and E. Parry Janis. The Art of French Calotype With a
Critical Dictionary of Photographers, 1845–1870. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Janis, Eugenia Jarry, The Photography of Gustave Le Gray,
Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago and the University of
Chicago Press, 1987.
La Blanchère, Henri de, Répertoire Encyclopédique de Photo-
graphie, Paris: Bureau de la Rédaction D’Abonnement et de
Vente, 1862.
Le Gray, Gustave, The Waxed Paper Process. London: George
Knight and Sons, 1855.
Sparling, W., Theory and Practice of the Photographic Art;
Including its Chemistry and Optics. London: Houlston and
Stoneman, 1856.
WEDGWOOD, THOMAS (1771–1805)
English experimenter
Wedgwood, collaborator with Humphry Davy on the
fi rst published account of photographic experiments,
was the son of the famous English potter and industrialist
Josiah Wedgwood. Educated largely at home under the
direction of his wealthy and doting father, Tom Wedg-
wood was given expert tutoring in almost every fi eld of
knowledge, from science to art, and counted as friends
some of Britain’s leading intellectual fi gures. Although
handicapped by a lifelong illness that eventually was to
take his life at an early age, he nevertheless worked on
a number of projects that attracted the attention of his
peers, some practical and some merely philosophical.
However it is for his experiments towards a photographic
process that he is best remembered today.
It is unclear when he began these experiments. In
November 1790, for example, he was working with
nitrate of silver at his father’s ceramics business,
leading to his invention of a ‘silvered ware’ in about
February 1791. He also had essays on his observations
of light read at the Royal Society, and wrote specu-
latively about optics and “Time, Space, and Motion.”
These last interests he shared with his close friend,
the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he
fi rst met in 1797. So close were they that Tom and his
brother granted Coleridge a lifetime annuity that en-
abled the poet to travel to Germany in 1798 and study
German idealist philosophy at fi rst hand. Exposure to
these radical new ideas undoubtedly stimulated Tom
Wedgwood’s thinking during the period in which he
experimented with photography.
Despite the existence of some undated letters refer-
ring vaguely to “Silver Pictures,” the only noncircum-
stantial evidence of these experiments is an essay that
appeared in the fi rst issue of the Journals of the Royal
Institution of Great Britain in June of 1802. Co-writ-
ten with its editor, the twenty-four year old Davy, the
essay was titled ‘An Account of a Method of Copying
Paintings Upon Glass, and of Making Profi les, by the
Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver,’ and describes
various experiments the two men had undertaken with
white paper or leather moistened with a solution of silver
nitrate and exposed to light.
White paper, or white leather, moistened with solution of
nitrate of silver, undergoes no change when kept in a dark
place; but, on being exposed to the day light, it speedily
changes colour, and, after passing through different shades
of grey and brown, becomes at length nearly black...
The condensation of these facts enables us readily to
understand the method by which the outlines and shades
of painting on glass may be copied, or profi les of fi gures
procured, by the agency of light...
The images formed by means of a camera obscura,
have been found to be too faint to produce, in any mod-
erate time, an effect upon the nitrate of silver. To copy
these images, was the fi rst object of Mr Wedgwood, in
his researches on the subject, and for this purpose he fi rst
used the nitrate of silver, which was mentioned to him by
a friend, as a substance very sensible to the infl uence of
light; but all his numerous experiments as to their primary
end proved unsuccessful.... Nothing but a method of pre-
venting the unshaded part of the delineation from being
coloured by exposure to the day is wanting, to render the
process as useful as it is elegant.
Despite their inability to make their images perma-
nent, in the space of fi ve short pages Davy and Wedg-
wood describe an impressive range of photographic
ideas and applications. Wedgwood apparently began
by attempting to capture the image formed by the cam-
era obscura, and only subsequently moved on to the
problem of copying pre-existing images. Of these, the