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APPERT, EUGÈNE (1830–1891)
French artist, photographer, and photomontagist
active during the Paris Commune (1871).
Ernest Eugène Appert was born in the Pays de la Loire,
Maine-et-Loire, Angers, France on 1830. In 1869 he be-
came an independent photographer and painter. Because
he had no sympathy with the communards, the rebels
participating in the Paris Commune in the spring of
1871; he produced a series of fake Versaille-propaganda
photomontages called ‘Crimes de la Commune’. Appert
was the genius behind a whole series of photomontages
meant to discredit the communards. It is likely that his
images were not of actual people protesting, but instead
of staged shots with actors.
After the rebellion, Appert took the portraits of hun-
dreds of the individual communards while imprisoned
in jail. He was not assigned this job by the authorities,
but took the initiative upon himself to do this, which
also happened to have a commercial motive. Indeed,
his photo graphs were eagerly purchased and reproduced
once and again. The police also benefi ted from his im-
ages by including them in their card indexes. Perhaps
though Appert was attempting to photograph ‘physi-
ognomy,’ which around 1870, became a very popular
pseudo science, based on the idea that a person’s physi-
cal appearance could convey his or her character and
personality. Appert died in 1891 in the Provence-Alpes-
Côte d’Azur, Alpes-Maritimes, Cannes, France.
Johan Swinnen
ARCHER, FREDERICK SCOTT
(1813–1857)
British sculptor, photographer, and inventor
Frederick Scott Archer was born in 1813 at Bishops
Stortford in the English county of Hertfordshire. He was
the second son of a butcher. Both Archer’s parents died
during his childhood leaving him to be brought up by
friends and relations. While a boy he was apprenticed to
a silversmith and bullion dealer, Massey of Leadenhall
Street, London, who traded in antique gems and coins.
Archer studied numismatics and became specialised in
giving valuations. However, the artistic design of the
coins, rather than their commercial value, interested
him most inspiring him to copy their designs by mod-
elling. It was this work which led him to make portrait
busts and eventually to set up as a sculptor in Henrietta
Street, London.
In 1823 he attended the Royal Academy Schools
(RA) at the recommendation of the numismatist and
keeper of coins, medals, prints and drawings at the Brit-
ish Museum, Edward Hawkins. From 1836 until 1851
Archer exhibited at the RA numerous works in sculp-
ture. These were mainly busts of well-known people,
such as the musician Sir George Smart (1839); the Dean
of Manchester (1848); the Marquees of Northampton
(1850); portrait medallions of the engineer Sir Isambard
Marc Brunel (1841, 1842), and miscellaneous narrative
or historical subjects Falling Angels (1836) and A Young
Briton Receiving Instruction (1848). The sculpture
Alfred the Great with the Book of Common Law was
exhibited at Westminster Hall in 1844 to mixed reviews.
His wall monument to Lady Albert Conyngham (1850)
for Mickleham Church, Surrey, carved in the form of an
urn, was illustrated by an engraving in the Gentleman’s
Magazine for May that year but was criticised as having
been “too servilely copied from the antique” (510–11).
Most of Archer’s works in sculpture remain untraced
in 2001.
Archer was often in poor health and it was through
his doctor and friend, Dr Hugh Welch Diamond, a keen
photographer, that he was introduced to William Henry
Fox Talbot’s calotype process in November 1847. Ini-
tially Archer used the photographic medium as an aid
to sculpture to record his fi nished work and probably to
photograph sitters from which he could model busts. He
became increasingly fascinated with photography to the
exclusion of sculpture and became an early member of
the Calotype Club (from 1848 referred to as the Photo-
graphic Club). At that time the two main photographic
processes in existence both had limitations. Daguerreo-
types were highly detailed but required long exposures
and produced a “one off” positive image; the calotype
allowed many prints to be made from one negative but
these were produced on paper and were therefore not as
sharp. Archer wrote in The Chemist (March 1851, 257)
that he was unhappy with “the imperfections of paper
photography” and of his endeavours to fi nd a negative
material possessing “fi neness of surface, transparency
and ease of manipulation.”
From 1848 Archer began experimenting with glass as
a negative support. A light-sensitive coating of albumen
(egg white) on glass had been used by others with some
success but the solution was diffi cult to spread smoothly
and was extremely delicate. Archer experimented in-
stead with collodion. This was made from guncotton,
a powerful explosive invented in 1846, produced by
soaking ordinary cotton in nitric and sulphuric acid. This
substance was then dissolved in a mixture of alcohol,
ether and potassium iodide to produce the syrupy col-
lodion that could be poured onto glass. This plate was
then sensitised in a bath of silver nitrate solution and
exposed in the camera while still wet. Archer’s fi ndings
were fi rst published in the Chemist in March 1851 in
a communication dated 18 February. The new process
was much faster than the calotype, reducing exposure
times to seconds rather than minutes. It was also less ex-
pensive to produce than the daguerreotype. Importantly,
it allowed superbly detailed negatives to be made of a