On January 18th, 1875, O. G. Rejlander died, much to the regret of all who took an interest in the art phase of photography. Rejlander has himself told us how, when, and where he first fell in love with photography. In 1851 he was not impressed with the Daguerreotypes at the great exhibition, nor with “reddish landscape photographs” that he saw in Regent Street; but when in Rome, in 1852, he was struck with the beauty of some photographs of statuary, which he bought and studied, and made up his mind to study photography as soon as he returned to England. How he did that will be best told by himself:—“In 1853, having inquired in London for the best teacher, I was directed to Henneman. We agreed for so much for three or five lessons; but, as I was in a hurry to get back to the country, I took all the lessons in one afternoon! Three hours in the calotype and waxed-paper process, and half-an-hour sufficed for the collodion process!! He spoke, I wrote; but I was too clever. It would have saved me a year or more of trouble and expense had I attended carefully to the rudiments of the art for a month.” His first attempt at “double printing” was exhibited in London in 1855, and was named in the catalogue, group printed from three negatives. Again, I must allow Mr. Rejlander to describe his reasons for persevering in the art of “double printing”:—“I had taken a group of two. They were expressive and composed well. The light was good, and the chemistry of it successful. A very good artist was staying in the neighbourhood, engaged on some commission. He called; saw the picture; was very much delighted with it, and so was I. Before he left my house he looked at the picture again, and said it was ‘marvellous,’ but added, ‘Now, if I had drawn that, I should have introduced another figure between them, or some light object, to keep them together. You see, there is where you photographers are at fault. Good morning!’ I snapped my fingers after he left—but not at him—and exclaimed aloud, ‘I can do it!’ Two days afterwards I called at my artist-friend’s hotel as proud as—anybody. He looked at my picture and at me, and took snuff twice. He said, ‘This is another picture.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it is the same, except with the addition you suggested.’ ‘Never,’ he exclaimed; ‘and how is it possible? You should patent that!’” Rejlander was too much of an artist to take anything to the Patent Office.
When I first saw his celebrated composition picture, “The Two Ways of Life,” in the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester in 1857, I wondered how he could have got so many men and women to become models, and be able to sit or stand in such varied and strained positions for the length of time then required by the wet collodion process; but my wonder ceased when I became acquainted with him in after years, and ascertained that he had the command of a celebrated troupe, who gave tableaux vivants representations of statues and groups from paintings under the direction and name of “Madame Wharton’s pose plastique troupe.” What became of the original “Two Ways of Life” I do not know, but the late Henry Greenwood possessed it at the time of Rejlander’s death, for I remember endeavouring to induce Mr. Greenwood to allow it to be offered as a bait to the highest contributor to the Rejlander fund; but Mr. Greenwood’s characteristic reply was, “Take my purse, but leave me my ‘Two Ways of Life.’” Mr. Rejlander kindly gave me a reduced copy of his “Two Ways of Life,” and many other examples of his works, both in the nude and semi-nude. Fortunately Rejlander did not confine himself to such productions, but made hundreds of draped studies, both comic and serious, such as “Ginx’s Baby,” “Did She?,” “Beyond the Bible,” and “Homeless.” Where are they all now? I fear most of them have faded away, for Rejlander was a somewhat careless operator, and he died before the more permanent process of platinum printing was introduced. When Rejlander died, his widow tried to make a living by printing from his negatives, but I fear they soon got scattered. Rejlander was a genial soul and a pleasant companion, and he had many kind friends among members of the Solar Club, as well as other clubs with which he was associated.
There is one more death in this year to be recorded, that of Thomas Sutton, B.A., the founder and for many years editor of Photographic Notes, and the inventor of a panoramic camera of a very clumsy character that bore his name, and that was all. Mr. Sutton was a very clever man with rather warped notions, and in the management of his Photographic Notes he descended to the undignified position of a caricaturist, and published illustrations of an uncomplimentary description, some of which were offensive in the extreme, and created a great deal of irritation in some minds at the time.
In 1877 Carey Lea gave his ferrous-oxalate developer to the world, but it was not welcomed by many English photographers for negative development, though it possessed many advantages over alkaline pyro. It was, however, generally employed by foreign photographers, and is now largely in use by English photographers, especially for the development of bromide paper, either for contact printing or enlargements. In the early part of this year, Messrs. Wratten and Wainwright commenced to make gelatino-bromide dry plates, and during the hot summer months Mr. Wratten found it necessary to precipitate the gelatine emulsion with alcohol. This removed the necessity of dialysing, and helped to lessen the evils of decomposition and “frilling.”
The most noticeable death in the photographic world of this year was that of Henry Fox Talbot. He was born on February the 11th, 1800, and died September 17th, 1877, thus attaining a ripe old age. I am not disposed to deny his claims to the honour of doing a great deal to forward the advancement of photography, but what strikes me very much is the mercenary spirit in which he did it, especially when I consider the position he occupied, and the pecuniary means at his command. In the first place, he rushed to the Patent Office with his gallo-nitrate developer, and then every little improvement or modification that he afterwards made was carefully protected by patent rights. With a churlishness of spirit and narrow-mindedness it is almost impossible to conceive or forgive, he tried his utmost to stop the formation of the London Photographic Society, and it was only after pressing solicitations from Sir Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy, and first President of the London Photographic Society, that he withdrew his objections. The late Peter le Neve Foster, Secretary of the Society of Arts, told me this years after, and when it was proposed to make Fox Talbot an honorary member of the Photographic Society, Mr. Foster was opposed to the proposition. Then the action that he brought against Sylvester Laroche was unjustifiable, for there really was no resemblance between the collodion and calotype means of making a negative, except in the common use of the camera, and the means of making prints was the same as that employed by Thomas Wedgwood, while the fixing process with hyposulphite of soda was first resorted to by the Rev. J. B. Reade, on the published information of Sir John Herschel.
On March 29th, 1878, Mr. Charles Bennett published his method of increasing the sensitiveness of gelatino-bromide plates. It may be briefly described as a prolonged cooking of the gelatine emulsion at a temperature of 90°, and, according to Mr. Bennett’s experience, the longer it was cooked the more sensitive it became, with a corresponding reduction of density when the prepared plates were exposed and developed.
April 20th of this year Mr. J. A. Spencer died, after a lingering illness, of cancer in the throat. Mr. Spencer was, at one period in the history of photography, the largest manufacturer of albumenized paper in this country, and carried on his business at Shepherd’s Bush. In 1866 he told me that he broke about 2,000 eggs daily, merely to obtain the whites or albumen. The yolks being of no use to him, he sold them, when he could, to glove makers, leather dressers, and confectioners, but they could not consume all he offered for sale, and he buried the rest in his garden until his neighbours complained of the nuisance, so that it became ultimately a very difficult thing for him to dispose of his waste yolks in any manner. After the introduction of Swan’s improved carbon process, he turned his attention to the manufacture of carbon tissue, and in a short time he became one of the partners in the Autotype Company, and the name of the firm at that period was Spencer, Sawyer, and Bird; but he ceased to be a partner some time before his death.
At the South London Technical Meeting, held in the great hall of the Society of Arts, I exhibited my non-actinic developing tray, and developed a gelatine dry plate in the full blaze of gas-light. A short extract from a leader in the Photographic News of November 14th, 1879, will be sufficient to satisfy all who are interested in the matter. “Amongst the many ingenious appliances exhibited at the recent South London meeting, none excited greater interest than the developing tray of Mr. Werge, in which he developed in the full gas-light of the room a gelatine plate which had been exposed in the morning, and exhibited to the meeting the result in a clean transparency, without fog, or any trace of the abnormal action of light.... We can here simply record the fact, interesting to many, that the demonstration before the South London meeting was a perfect success.”
1880 had a rather melancholy beginning, for on January the 15th, Mr. George Wharton Simpson died suddenly, which was a great shock to everyone that knew him. I had seen him only a few days before in his usual good health, and he looked far more like outliving me than I him; besides, he was a year my junior. The extract above quoted was the last time he honoured me by mentioning my name in his writings, though he had done so many times before, both pleasantly and in defending me against some ill-natured and unwarrantable attacks in the journal which he so ably conducted for twenty years.
Mungo Ponton died August 3rd, 1880. Though his discovery did little or nothing towards the development of photography proper, it is impossible to allow him to pass out of this world without honourable mention, for his discovery led to the creation and development of numerous and important photo-mechanical industries, which give employment to numbers of men and women. When Mungo Ponton announced his discovery in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal in 1839, he probably never dreamt that it would be of any commercial value, or he might have secured rights and royalties on all the patent processes that grew out of it; for Poitevin’s patent, 1855, Beauregard’s, 1857, Pouncy’s, 1858 and 1863, J. W. Swan’s, 1864, Woodbury’s, 1866, all the Autotype and Lambertype and kindred patents, as well as all the forms of Collotype printing, are based on Ponton’s discovery. But so it is: the originator of anything seldom seeks any advantage beyond the honour attached to the making of a great invention or discovery. It is generally the petty improvers that rush to the Patent Office to secure rights and emoluments, regardless of the claims of the founders of their patented processes.