In 1850 the albumen print process was invented in France by Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard. Used almost exclusively in combination with glass plate negatives, the clarity and detail of the prints produced by this…
This week’s illustrations come from an album of watercolours of St Andrews compiled by John Cook in 1797. It contains the usual views which one might expect to see in this sort of scrapbook: St Andrews from all angles,…
On the 15th of May, 1617, King James VI & I landed at Port ‘Seatown’ (now Seton) to begin what would be his only homecoming tour of Scotland. James left Scotland 14 years earlier to become the first King of Great…
The first photographic print medium was known as the salted paper print and was invented by the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. Publicly announced in 1839 as a means of duplicating the photogenic drawing,…
On 27 July 1822 – 190 years to the day before this post is written – Thomas Moody set off from Paris to begin a tour which would allow him to take a “bird’s eye view” of the “romantic and beautiful scenery in…
This week’s illustration post comes straight out of a very close-knit circle of Renaissance Italian humanists working in the 16th century, however the story begin in 15th century Greece. Cristoforo Buondelmonti, an…
The term “calotype” is from the Greek kalos meaning beautiful. It is the name given to Fox Talbot‘s negative process. The name is often mistakenly applied to photographic “salted paper” prints (positives) which have…
“Drawings made by a black fellow at Corowa New South Wales June 1886. His name I do not know. By the whites he goes by the name of Tommy Macrae…He is quite self-taught at drawing.” This is the handwritten note on an…
This week’s illustration post brings together two wonders of the 19th century industrial imagination: amateur astronomy and photography. Photography had become successful and popular by the mid-19th century both…
The photogenic drawing was the first of Fox Talbot’s photographic processes which he would present to the world on the 25th of January, 1839. This process was not what practitioners today would identify as photography…