known and better explored, it will probable be much frequented. Already sundry amateurs have laid down the pencil and armed themselves with chemical solutions and with camerae obscurae. These amateurs especially, and they are not a Lew, who find the rules of perspective difficult to learn and to apply — and who. moreover, have the misfortune to be lazy — prefer to use a method which dispenses with all trouble.
The talbotype, however, was not free for all to use, lor in 1841 Talbot had secured for it Her Majesty’s Royal Letters Patent No. 8842. This action, so out of keeping with the open and unrestricted publication of his original process, was perhaps suggested to Talbot by the example of Daguerre, who
hill & adamson: James Glencairn Burns, about 1845. From calotype negative in collection F. C. Inglis, Edinburgh
had patented the daguerreotype in England. Talbot had received no recompense and but little recognition for his invention: Daguerre, on the other hand, had been rewarded with a life-long pension, was receiving income from the sale of licenses in England, and had won international fame. Talbot saw others making a commercial success with photography, and felt entitled to exact royalties from those using his invention.
He vigilantly controlled the patent, prosecuting those who infringed it. Amateurs and professionals felt hampered, and the Presidents of the Royal Academy and of the Photographic Society jointly appealed to Talbot to relax his grip. In a letter published in The Times, August 13, 1852, he relinquished all control of his invention except its use for taking portraits for profit.
The exception was significant, for portraiture was the most lucrative use of photography. Fortunes had been made: in one year Richard Beard, neither scientist nor artist, but a former coal merchant, realized £40,000 from the chain of daguerreotype portrait galleries which he owned and managed in cities throughout the British Isles. Up to 1851 by far the greater number of professional portraitists used the daguerreotype, which was more suited than the talbotype for the rapid production methods essential to commercial success, and which, by its shorter exposure time, was less of a tax on the sitter’s patience. But with the introduction of a new process both the daguerreotype and the talbotype were dropped almost at once. Like the talbotype, the new collodion process was negative-positive. The negatives were on glass instead of on paper, they were developed in pyrogallic acid instead of “gallo-nitrate of silver,” and the exposures were shorter. This technique seemed to Talbot identical in principle to his own, and he considered it an outright infringement of his patent. He sued a professional portraitist, Silvester Laroche, for working it without a license.
The case was taken into court in 1854. The defense attempted to show (1) that Talbot was not entitled to the patent which he held and (2), even if he was. the collodion process was so dissimilar and distinct from the talbotype that no infringement could be claimed. To support the first argument, evidence was submitted that Talbot had been preceded in the use of gallic acid by the Reverend Joseph Bancroft Reade. The intricacies of photo-chemistry perplexed the judge, who said to the jury, “It is already sufficiently difficult to understand the subject, particularly as you and I know nothing at all about it. ... I am sorry to say the case kept me awake all last night.” He was able, however, to reduce the second charge to a technicality which he summed up in his charge to the jury:
hill & adamson: John Henning and Alexander Handyside Ritchie. Calotype, about 1845. Collection Heinrich Schwarz, Providence, R.I.
Is pyrogallic acid, though it may differ in its shape, in its action with reagents, in its composition, is it or is it not a chemical equivalent with gallo-nitrate of silver? If it is, the defendant is guilty; if it is not, he is not guilty.
After an hour’s deliberation the jury brought in a double verdict. They found the defendant. Laroche, not guilty. They also found that Talbot was the first and true inventor of the talbotype “within the meaning of the Patent Laws: that is, the first person who disclosed it to the public.”
The artistic potentialities of Fox Talbot’s process were first demonstrated by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, who took hundreds of portraits in Edinburgh. Hill was a painter of local repute; he was secretary of the Scottish Academy of Painting, and had published a series of landscape lithographs as The Land of Burns. In 1843 he received a gigantic commission: to portray, on one canvas, all four hundred and fifty delegates to the convention at which the Free Church of Scotland was founded. To secure likenesses of each one of these Scottish worthies was a Herculean task. Hill had dabbled with photography, and the thought occurred to him to use photographs as preliminary studies. He secured, on Sir David Brewster’s recommendation, the assistance of Robert Adamson, a young chemist and photographer who, Brewster had said, “was doing some of the very finest things in portrait and landscape.”
The two collaborated until 1848, when Adamson died at the age of twentyseven. They did not limit their work to making memoranda for Hill’s “Disruption” picture: all kinds of sitters found their way to the out-door studio on Calton Hill, or were photographed among the baroque monuments of the Greyfriars Cemetery. The part which Adamson played appears to have been more than that of technician, for on his death Hill ceased to make photographs until he again found a collaborator, and these later pictures do not compare with the work he did with Adamson.
They posed their sitters outdoors, usually singly. The strong shadows cast by the direct sunlight were softened by reflecting light into them with a concave mirror; the exposures were minutes long. They saw their subjects broadly, and composed in simple masses of light and shade, as if they had an intuitive respect for the medium. For the calotype process, unlike the daguerreotype, could not record delicate and fine detail. The fibers of the paper on which the negative was made were themselves reproduced in the positive print. Although the finest paper was used, and although Talbot, in an improvement to his patent, described waxing the paper negative to improve its transparency, detail was inevitably destroyed.
hill & adamson: Portrait in the manner of a Dutch seventeenth-century painting. Calotype. Collection Heinrich Schwarz, Providence, R.I.
The influence of painting is strong in the work of these pioneer Scotch photographers. Hugh Miller, the geologist, had compared their portraits with Raeburn’s, and some of their genre studies of ladies clothed in glistening gowns of rich silk remind one of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings. But we remember Hill and Adamson for the dignity and depth of their perception, and for their awareness of individual character — qualities seldom equalled by later photographers during the century that has elapsed since they worked together. A collection of their calotypes received Honorable Mention at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the London Crystal Palace; during the next decade they were widely shown. Then they were almost forgotten until in 1890 J. Craig Annan made modern prints from the old negatives which delighted connoisseurs. James McNeill Whistler, among other artists, praised them; they were recognized as incunabula of portrait photography. Hill’s paintings, however, have long since been forgotten. He did not complete the great canvas which had led him into photographic work until 1866, four years before his death.
An attempt was made to popularize the talbotype in the United States. Frederick Langenheim and his brother William purchased the American rights from Talbot — he had taken out a United States patent — and tried to sell licenses. They pointed out in a broadside addressed to daguerreotypists that paper portraits and views were “devoid of all metallic glare,” and could be multiplied “to an unlimited extent with very little expense and labor.” Their appeal met with no response. “A thousand of these circulars have been distributed all over the union,” they wrote Talbot, “but, horribile dictu, up to this date, Novbr 18 [1849] not a single license has been sold.” They failed, partly because their results could not be compared with the brilliant and precisely defined daguerreotypes which delighted the American public, and partly because American photographers rebelled at paying a license fee to anybody.