324
Mansion a renowned colourist worked for A. Claudet
during 1840s and1850s. Auguste and Louis Lumiere
patented the autochrome process of colour photogra-
phy in 1904.
See Also: Daguerreotype; Beard, Richard;
Southworth, Albert Sands, and Josiah Johnson
Hawes; Claudet, Antoine-François-Jean; Maxwell,
James Clark; Ducos du Hauron, André Louis; and
Lumière, Auguste and Louis.
Further Reading
Allwood, John, The Great Exhibition Studio Vista, London,
1977.
Briggs, Asa, From Today Painting is Dead The beginnings of
Photography, The Arts Council, London, 1972.
Buerger, J,E., French Daguerreotypes, Chicago, 1989.
Coke, Joan, Dissertation on A. Claudet University of New
Mexico.,
Ford, Colin, Portraits The Library of World Photography ,Thames
and Hudson.
Freud, Gisele, Photography and Society Gordon Fraser, London,
1980.
Gernsheim, Helmut, The Origins of Photography, Thames and
Hudson, 1982.
Gernsheim, Helmut A History of Photography, Dover, London,
1986.
Hannavy, John, The Victorian Professional Photographer, Shire
Publications Ltd, UK,
Heyert, Elizabeth, The Glass House Years (Victorian Portrait Pho-
tography 1839-1870), Montclair and London, USA, 1979,
Hayworth-Booth, M., The Golden Age of British Photography
1839–1900, New York Aperture, 1984.
Hillier, Bevis, Victorian Studio Photographs,.Ash and Grant
Ltd, UK, 1975.
Jay, Bill, Cyanide and Spirits An inside-out View of Early Pho-
tography, Nazraeli Press, Germany, 1991.
Lassam, Robert, Portrait and the Camera Studio, Editions,
London, 1989.
Macdonald, Gus, Camera Eye Witness, BT Batsford Ltd, Lon-
don, 1979.
Newhall, Beaumont, The Daguerreotype in America, New York,
Dover, 1976.
Newhall, Beaumont, Photography Essays and Images, The Mu-
seum of Modern Art, New York, 1980.
Pols, Robert, Understanding Old Photographs, Robert Boyd
Publications, UK, 1995.
Richter, Stefan (Introduction by Helmut Gernsheim), The Art of
the Daguerreotype, Viking, UK, 1989.
Thomas, Alan, The Expanding Eye Photography and the Nine-
teeth Century Mind, Croom Helm, London, 1978,
Wade, N.J., Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, London, 1985.
Wood, John, The Daguerreotype (A Sesquentenial Celebration),
University of Iowa Press, USA, 1989.
COMPOSITION
Before the invention of the calotype (and the daguerreo-
type), artists and amateurs used various drawing devices.
The camera obscura became the camera. Instead of trac-
ing a drawing of what was seen, the ‘camera’ could now
impregnate a description of what was seen onto a piece
of paper. The use of this instrument which could be the
size of the palm of a hand or a table, was designed as an
aid, that is, its function was already prescribed before it
came into existence—such instruments go back at least
to the 15th century, to Durer’s woodcuts of 1525–38 of
drawing machines, or even before. It is only post the in-
vention of photography that their use became dislocated
and, until the 1960s almost entirely forgotten, so that,
post the invention of photography, during the 19th cen-
tury Romantic period, artists took fl ight; as the French
artist Ingres commented, “It is to this exactitude that I
would like to attain, it is admirable—but one must not
say so.” Instead artists were now to be deemed to be good
draughtsman solely by their individual dexterity, their
talent of genius. This was a historical lie, told because
it suited the culture of the day to think it so. But today
we can acknowledge the debt that artists such Durer,
Mantegna, Vermeer et al owed to such aids. Indeed it
may well be that often those Renaissance ‘mysterious’
constructions in paint, including their compositions,
are probably only mysterious to our eyes because we
no longer know exactly how such devices contributed
to the end results.
When William Henry Fox Talbot, on his honeymoon
in 1833 to Bellagio, Italy, using his little Wollaston’s
camera lucida in his hand and tracing tentatively a de-
scription of Lake Como, thought about the possibilities
of fi xing nature’s image permanently onto the paper to
obviate his necessity for continuing to draw badly, art-
ists and some scientists had already thought about this
possibility for around four centuries. What he produced
in drawing was a good example of how the aid was used,
that is, its use was limited to the perception of how it
‘could’ be used. In the amateur results of the use of such
instruments we can see clearly that, in spite of what
was seen on the ground glass screen, the view in front
of the camera obscura had still to be translated into a
‘good’ composition; that is, one that followed a known
and accepted formula of that time of what constituted
a ‘beautiful picture.’ Similarly, in the fi rst place, the
view chosen for study, particularly amongst amateur
users, would be selected if it conformed to that which
was acceptable, fashionable. In Britain, around the
time of the invention of photography in the 1840s, that
conformity would be to produce images that accorded
with the tradition of the Picturesque, of William Gilpin’s
Three Essays (1792). Gilpin (amateur artist) argued that
it is the artist’s task to supply ‘composition’ to the raw,
inadequate, nature, and that while looking at nature,
this task is to recognise when it behaves itself; supplies
that which is agreeable to the art of making a picture. In
other words it was a known quantity. This has continued
to our time, for example, the accepted criteria applied
to photography in some quarters resulted in ‘rules’ of