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and, more importantly, townscapes and landscapes. In
addition, he experimented abundantly with inventive
techniques. However, this dilettantism, displaying the
true spirit of the pioneer, did not imply a sloppy output.
On the contrary, highly educated and sophisticated both
in his knowledge of chemistry and in his experience
and understanding of the visual arts, Wood made some
exceptional photographs in the 1840s and 1850s. These
pictures are original accomplishments, both on the
scientifi c and artistic sides of photography. It still is a
mystery why his name does not turn up in most general
surveys of the history of the medium.
His portraits and group portraits, which sometimes
depict his friends from art circles, are typical for the
early years of photography. Showing some similarities
with the work of David Octavius Hill and Robert Ad-
amson, they can be considered as exercises in fi nding
appropriate positions while dealing with relatively long
exposure times. Some of his group portraits are situated
in a garden setting, taking the photographic portrait away
from the studio and insisting on giving the fi gures a con-
text in which their lives and day-to-day existence could
be suggested and felt. Nevertheless, his fi gures are often
isolated and they show a frozen and oddly sculptural ef-
fect. Wood, for that matter, photographed sculptures as
well, just as Daguerre and Talbot did. A bust of Bacchus,
for instance, is photographed from different viewpoints
and under different lighting conditions. This interest in
rendering three-dimensional volumes by means of light
and shadow is also present in some of his portraits, in
which even a Caravagist claire-obscure is achieved.
In the summer of 1847, John Muir Wood made a
trip to the continent. After a brief stopover in York and
London, he visited Belgium, which was developing
into an important tourist stop for English and Scottish
travellers. Not only was it the inevitable fi rst stop on a
Grand Tour on the continent but the romantic predilec-
tion for the Middle Ages also stimulated the interest in
the old Flemish cities with their belfries, cloth halls,
cathedrals and castles. Muir, just like George Moir of the
Edinburgh Calotype Club or Talbot, contributed to this
tourist exploration by taking pictures of medieval city
centres. He also wrote a kind of travel report, in which
he carefully noted which pictures were taken on which
day. His trip brought him to Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen,
and Brussels. After Brussels, he did no longer include
remarks on photography, but his diary indicates that he
also visited the battlefi eld of Waterloo, and the cities
of Namur, Charleroi, Huy, and Liège, where his report
ends abruptly. Probably, this travel report is incomplete
because his estate also contains pictures of Antwerp and
Leuven. It is also possible that he continued his journey
in Germany, where he photographed the cities of Co-
logne, Heidelberg, Nuremberg, and Munich—it is also
possible that these pictures were made during another
trip since the dates are not indicated and probably prints
were made years after the negatives were taken. His
pictures of Flemish cities are both important historical
documents and examples of an original photographical
approach to the motif of the city. His depiction of the
Groene Rei in Bruges is one of the oldest photographs
of that city but also an example of Wood’s consummate
skill to make a balanced composition. Wood, playing
with the diversity of tones, clearly had the photographic
capacity to imagine the fi nal result of his shooting. This
is also the case in his Ghent pictures, which give us
valuable information because they show the city before
its major urban transformations of the later nineteenth
century: the belfry has still its old wooden crowning
and the castle is mostly hidden behind the houses built
against it. The picture of the Ghent castle is a perfect
example of Wood’s response to the picturesque disorder
of medieval towns. Unmistakably, he is more interested
in the all-over pictorial effect than in architectural details
or construction.
This aesthetic of the picturesque also turns up in his
photographs of the ruins of Melrose Abbey and his evo-
cations of the Scottish landscape, which was presented,
both in the work of native and foreign artists and poets,
as the ultimate romantic landscape. Wood also tried to
register the sublime vagueness and freakishness of the
Scottish scenery, answering to the romantic sensibility
of his musical preferences. Often, he refers to traditional
pictorial conventions, of which he had a sophisticated
understanding. In other cases, he created remarkable
unconventional and impenetrable compositions of
woodlands without subject matter.
Throughout his career, Wood used the calotype in-
stead of the highly polished metal daguerreotype or the
later albumen process on glass. Even long after the in-
troduction of glass negatives, he continued to use paper
negatives. The calotype, of course, suited perfectly his
picturesque way of seeing, which favoured the vivid all-
over effect and subtle gradations of light over details and
sharpness. His attention to light and hues lay also at the
base of his experiments with different printing processes
in the 1850s and 1860s, which resulted in an unparal-
leled chromatic intensity and vibrancy of color.
Steven JacobsBiography
John Muir Wood was born in Edinburgh in 1805. Being
part of a family of piano-makers and music publishers,
he became a pianist, music teacher, musicologist, and
impresario. After an education in Paris and Vienna in
1826–1828, he set up as a music teacher and joined his
brother George in the family business. He organized
concerts for famous musicians including Chopin and
Listz and did research on the history of Scottish music.