492
pièce de resistance, described in contemporary sources
in blushingly superlative terms. Around 1788 he began
to construct and exhibit automata, and in the 1790s
after reputedly buying the apparatus of Paul Philidor
in Vienna, gave phantasmagoria ghost-raising shows in
Berlin. For the coronation of Franz II in Vienna, he re-
leased a gigantic baloon in the form of a colossal temple
surrounded by genies and allegorical fi gures. Enslen’s
illusions, including a room-sized camera obscura en-
tertainment, were always meticulously constructed and
brilliantly performed. An admiring Prussian King gave
him a large estate near Danzig, where Enslen retired at
the age of 46 and turned to astronomical observations
of the Aurora borealis, scientifi c experiments, and the
making of moon globes, as a sideline taking over the
local iron foundry, expanding it into the largest regional
factory with about 60 workers. When Napoleon’s troops
confi scated his lands and his ironworks in 1807, Enslen
returned to the life of a travelling showman, together
with his son exhibiting 1 × 4 meter half-panoramas
in Germany, central Europe and Italy, retiring for the
second time in 1834 to Dresden. Here he published the
fi rst of his two monographs on the nature of light and
returned to the study of the moon, making seven half-
spherical moon globes which were given to the leading
observatories of the day, including Greenwich.
Early in 1839, while Daguerre’s process was still
secret, Enslen began to experiment with photography.
He said then and in later years that he followed Talbot’s
methods, which were fi rst partially communicated to
the Royal Society on 31 January 1839, but his inability
to fi x his images permanently until sometime after
March, 1839 has led the historian Stephan Oettermann
(see further reading, below) to suggest that at the
beginning Enslen was actually following the earliest
work of Thomas Wedgwood, and was again, as with
his other Dresden activities, picking up one of the sci-
entifi c interests that had intrigued him during his fi rst
retirement at Danzig. From April through the end of the
year, Enslen made numerous photogenic drawings by
laying out complicated arrangements of pressed ferns,
feathers, butterfl ies and leaves on his salted paper, in a
kind of early Biedermeier design. A portrait of Fred-
erick the Great, a head of Christ, a Mary and Child, a
view of the market in Dresden, or of the Frauenkirche
in Dresden, some also surrounded by ferns and other
natural objects, were prepared using engravings made
transparent by soaking them in varnish and then laying
them out on his photographically sensitised paper, as
Niecephore Niepce had done in the 1820s. Enslen’s
experiments were reported beginning in April, 1839 in
newspapers in Leipzig, Dresden, Vienna and elswhere;
he assiduously sent photographs to many friends and
acquaintances, including one by unknown means to
Talbot at Laycock Abbey, a print which despite beingproperly inventoried there toured America in 1988 as an
original Talbot image. Enslen seems to have remained
active as a photographer only for about two years: a
planned 1841 publication Anleitung zur Verfertigung von
Lichtbildern auf photogenischem Paper (Instructions
for the Preparation of Light Pictures on Photographic
Paper) was never printed and its manuscript is now
lost. His interest in photography, although indubitably
motivated in part by his unfl agging curiosity about all
kinds of illusions, seems to have been not in exactly
reproducing the natural world, but rather in photography
as a reproductive process that could replace the printing
press and again, like his aerostatic fi gures, be carried
in a hand satchel. He therefore never used a camera but
remained dedicated to photogenic drawing.
Deac RossellBiography
Johann Carl Enslen was born in Stuttgart on 21 May
1759, but the events of his youth, education and early
work remain obscure. Around 1782 he moved to Stras-
sbourg, where just a few months after the fi rst baloon
ascent by the Mongolfi er brothers the young 24-year-old
seemingly without prior training built the fi rst German
Mongolfi ère, in which the eleventh manned fl ight took
place from the Finkmatt on 15 May 1784. From 1785 to
1800 he travelled across Europe with an array of what
he called “aerostatic sculptures,” baloons fashioned in
splendid Rococo style of gods and animals, with which
he captivated the leading courts in Paris, London, Vienna
and Berlin and whose fl ights in “air hunts” attracted
tens of thousands of spectators. About 1788 he began
to construct automats, including a piano player, a me-
chanical bird and a fl ute player that inspired Emanuel
Schikaneder to form the character of Papageno in his
libretto for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “The Magic
Flute.” Continuing his experiments in physics, optics
and mechanics, he opened a theatre in Berlin and gave
elaborate and skillful exhibitions of white magic using
mirrors, a room-sized camera obscura, and some of the
earliest Phantasmagoria lantern apparatus. Wealthy and
famous, Enslen retired at the age of 40 and moved to
his estate near Danzig, where he took up astronomy,
constructed a globe of the Moon and made optical
experiments. He became interested in the making of
iron and by 1804 owned the largest iron foundry in the
Danzig area, with some 60 employees. Three years later
his works was confi scated by Napoleonic troops, and
after losing his estate he returned to Berlin in 1811 and
re-started his career as a showman, building automats,
projecting microscopic objects with a solar microscope,
and exhibiting a huge relief model of Paris. From 1816
he painted and exhibited a new form of panorama with
his son, a half-round panorama about 1 meter by 4 me-ENSLEN, JOHANN CARL
Hannavy_RT72353_C005.indd 492 7/5/2007 11:18:23 AM