There were seventy-one galleries in New York City in 1850, employing in all one hundred and twenty-seven operators. Each American city and most of the larger towns boasted of several daguerrean galleries apiece, many of which were magnificently fitted out. In Luther Holman Hale’s Boston gallery, the pianoforte, the music box, the singing of birds; the elegant drapery; the beautiful pictures; the expensive gallery of portraits; the struggling sunbeam peering
John Quincy Adams, President of the United States. Daguerreotype from the gallery of Southworth & Hawes, Boston. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
| WHIPPI.E & JAMES WALLACE BLACK (?): John Brown of Osawatomie. Detail of a daguerreotype taken in the winter of 1856-57 for James Redpath, and given by him to The Boston Athenaeum |  |
through doors of stained glass; statuary, engravings; all. all seem to impress the visitor with the ideal of palace-like magnificence, and serve to soothe the troubled spirit, and calm the anxious brow, preparatory to the obtaining of a good picture.
Daguerreotypists vied with one another for the privilege of making portraits of the famous. One of the largest collections was formed by Mathew B. Brady,* a leather-case maker who had begun to take daguerreotypes in 1844. Me planned a Gallery of Illustrious Americans, and in 1850 published the
• His first name is spelled in this fashion on his gravestone. He always signed his letters ”M. B. Brady.” No one ever knew what the “B” stood for.
first instalment: twelve lithographs by Francois d’Avignon, eleven of which were copies of daguerreotypes. The publication was a failure: not even the price of materials was recovered. But Brady continued to add to his collection; his name became a household word; again and again wood engravings in the illustrated magazines of the fifties and engraved frontispieces in biographies bear the credit: “From a Daguerreotype by Brady.”
In Boston Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes produced portraits far removed from the conventional stiff poses so favored by the majority of their colleagues. When Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court came to their gallery he happened to stand in a beam of sunlight which brought out his rugged features with uncompromising force; the daguerreotypists took him as he stood. They went to the home of John Quincy Adams and there daguerreotyped him with spontaneous informality, sitting by the fireplace, a bookstrewn table at his elbow. They even took a schoolroom full of girls. Hawes remained a photographer to his death in 1901. and although he gave up taking daguerreotypes commercially in the late fifties, turning to the production of the more popular paper prints, he never lost his love for the process, which he attempted to revive in the 1890's. Because Southworth and Hawes took many plates at each sitting, a quantity of duplicates remained in the Hawes studio; the cream of this collection is now divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Their portraits, usually on whole plates (6 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches) were larger than the average. It was their boast that they never charged less than $5 for a picture.
This was well above the general price of $1 for a medium plate (2 3/4 x 3 1/4 inches), complete with case. Competition forced prices lower and lower, until by slap-dash methods daguerreotypes were made at two for a quarter. In vain did the conscientious artists of the profession form protective societies, boycotting the “blue bosom boys” — so called because they were not craftsmen enough to record properly a white shirt front.
The daguerreotype was doomed. It did not lend itself to ready duplication. It was fragile and had to be kept under glass in a bulky case. It was hard to look at because of the metallic glare. And it was expensive. When the rival paper process was perfected so that the public could buy a dozen prints for less than the price of one daguerreotype, the beautiful silver picture became obsolete.
3 PRINTS FROM PAPER
While Daguerre was perfecting Niepce’s heliography in France, William Henry Fox Talbot, English scientist and mathematician of means, was busily conducting similar researches in England. Neither knew of the other’s work until Arago's lecture to the Academy of Sciences in January, 1839, informed Talbot of the Frenchman’s success and spurred him on to prior publication.
In his book. The Pencil of Nature (1844), Talbot tells us how he had the idea of what came to be called photography.
One of the first days of the month of October, 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s camera lucida, or rather, I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success . . . After various fruitless attempts I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing which unfortunately I did not possess. I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried many years before. This method was, to take a camera obscura and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus — fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away. It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me — how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!
As soon as he returned to England, Talbot began to experiment with making paper light sensitive. He bathed paper with a weak solution of common salt (sodium chloride) and then, after it had dried, with a strong solution of silver nitrate. The two chemicals reacted to form silver chloride, an insoluble and light sensitive salt, in the fibers of the paper. He pressed a leaf, a feather, a piece of lace against this prepared paper under glass. Light darkened the paper wherever it had not been protected by the object in contact with its surface. Talbot then washed the paper either with a strong solution of common salt or with potassium iodide. Because silver salts formed with an excess of chloride are less light sensitive than those formed with silver in excess, treatment with salt solution reduced the sensitivity of the unaltered silver salts to such a degree that the prints could be examined in daylight. The silver
J. A. CLAUDET: Fox Talbot, inventor of photography on paper. Daguerreotype. 1844. Collection Miss M. T. Talbot, Lacock Abbey, England
iodide formed by treatment with potassium iodide darkens only slowly in daylight.
He now began to use this material to record the image of the camera obscura. His first camera was, he said, made “out of a large box, the image being thrown upon one end of it by a good object glass fixed in the opposite end.’’ An hour’s exposure on a summer afternoon left only the image of the highlights on the paper. But with smaller cameras he had better success, obtaining “very perfect, but extremely small, pictures; such ... as might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist.” One of these, signed and dated 1835, is still preserved; it is a tiny negative hardly an inch square. He had a collection of box cameras — “little mouse traps” his wife called them — with which, on a sunny day, he would surround his country house, Lacock Abbey, near Bath. “After the lapse of half an hour I gathered them all up, and brought them within doors to open them. When opened, there was found in each a miniature picture of the objects before which it had been placed.”
In his researches, Talbot came upon the description of Wedgwood’s work, but he later claimed that he was completely unaware of what Daguerre was doing, and Arago’s lecture on the daguerreotype to the French Academy of Science took him completely by surprise. “I was placed,” he recollected, “in a very unusual dilemma (scarcely paralleled in the annals of science,) for I was threatened with the loss of all my labours, in case M. Daguerre’s process proved to be identical with mine.”