694
in the mid 1860s were becoming increasingly popular.
According to one contemporary they allowed “greater
scope for the display of an artist’s skill, and a more com-
manding picture produced.” (Cox 1876, p.40). Attempts
were made to popularise larger formats. Valentine
Blanchard in England introduced the boudoir portrait,
which was described as having similar relative propor-
tions to the carte-de-visite but larger. It was designed to
show the full-length fi gure. An American introduction,
of a similar size but with slightly different proportions,
was styled the promenade portrait. Only the wealthiest
clients would ask for portraits in whole-plate or 10 ×
8 inches. The increasing popularity of larger portraits
helped promote a renewed interest in enlarging. Enlarg-
ing was generally seen as a tedious business involving
cumbersome solar enlargers and long exposures. Most
earlier photographers seeking a large image had pre-
ferred to use a large camera. However, in 1873 John
Trail Taylor reported “it is signifi cant that several Lon-
don photographers of reputation have already disposed
of their large lenses as instruments for which they have
no further need” (British Journal Photographic Almanac
1873 , 19). By using a long extending focus camera to
produce an enlarged intermediate transparent positive,
which could then be further enlarged using the same
procedure, it had been found that good images of up to
12 × 10 inches were possible. Such techniques required
skill, exposures remained long and most photographers
were still reliant on natural light. Enlargements could
be made by artifi cial light using oxy-hydrogen limelight
and appropriate equipment was marketed but there is
little evidence it was widely used. Although continuing
to make extensive use of the solar enlarger, American
studios had a reputation for producing exceptionally
fi ne enlargements. Interest in stereoscopic photography
continued to decline in Europe but remained popular
in America. Negative retouching became widespread
in European and American studios of the 1870s al-
though there were many critics of the practice and it
became one of the major controversies of the decade.
Wharton Simpson in Britain perhaps summed up the
trade attitude when he claimed “The introduction of
the practice of working on the negative has given to
negatives of inferior quality a factitious appearance of
better work; the smoothness, and apparent delicacy and
fi nish, recalling in some qualities the characteristics of
really artistic portraiture. This dead level of qualities
which please the public taste is a doubtful benefi t to the
art, but it has undoubtedly done something to stimulate
the trade in photographic portraiture.”(The Year-Book
of Photography 1876, 18–19). Experiments to make
portraits by the light of burning magnesium powder
were abandoned in the 1860s. The fi rst portrait studios
to successfully use artifi cial light were the electric light
studios in Paris of Van der Weyde in 1878 and Liebert
in 1879 but they were not typical of the period. Tintype
portraits continued to be popular in America but were
generally held in low regard in Europe.
The better studio photographers of the 70s made sub-
tle use of posing, lighting and backgrounds to achieve
the desired artistic impression. The most famous pro-
fessional studio portraitist of the day was probably the
French “Titian of Photography,” Nadar (Gaspard Felix
Tournachon), although following the siege of Paris and
the subsequent social unrest, much of the work com-
ing from his studio was by his assistants and his son,
Paul. Also active until the middle of the decade was
another notable French photographer, Etienne Carjat.
Like Nadar, Carjat’s reputation was based largely on his
portraits of contemporary celebrities. The work of both
appeared in Galerie Contemporaine, a series of portraits
and accompanying biographical text, of distinguished
French artistic and political fi gures that was published
weekly between 1876 and 1880. There was a view that
the overall quality of British portrait photography was
inferior to that of their French contemporaries although
the French artist and photographer, Antoine Adam-
Salomon, wrote in 1871 of ‘the marked progress made
in artistic portraiture by English photographers’ (Year-
Book of Photography 1871, 23). In America, William
Kurtz’s “Rembrandt” portraits, Napoleon Sarony’s,
unconventional posing and J.M. Mora’s use of exotic
backgrounds, earned them nation-wide recognition.
While it was commonplace for the most humble
studios to advertise their portraits as artistic, there
were some photographers continuing to suggest that
photography should have more lofty ambitions and
the question of whether photography was capable of a
position amongst the fi ne arts remained a hotly argued
debating point. Three of the most distinguished ‘high
art’ photographers of the period were active in England
during the 1870s but Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar
Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson had
made their reputations, and arguably produced their best
works, in the previous decade. Cameron is celebrated
today primarily for the large close-up portraits of fa-
mous men such as Darwin, Herschel and Tennyson, all
taken in the 1860s. Tennyson later suggested she should
create images for his Idylls of the King and these were
published in 1874 and 1875. Even the best of Cameron’s
genre studies are mawkish to modern eyes and the Ten-
nyson pictures are not her best work. Cameron and her
husband soon left England for Ceylon. She continued
to practice photography but produced no further major
work and died in 1879. The painter-photographer, Oscar
Rejlander was also close to the end of his career. His
moral allegory printed from thirty separate negatives,
The Two Ways of Life, had provoked a minor sensation
in the late 1850s. Other moralistic studies followed and
for a time he was an infl uential fi gure. By the 1870sHISTORY: 6. 1870s