At the next meeting—June 9th—Mr. J. R. Sawyer reopened the discussion on the above subject by reading a paper and exhibiting examples of his own experiments, and Mr. Sawyer admitted that he was “bound to confess that while every effort should be made to discover chemical combinations which will give the utmost value that can be practicably obtained in the reproduction (?) of colours, yet that, in all probability, art—and art not inferior to that of a competent engraver—will be necessary to assist photography in rendering the very subtle combinations of colour that present themselves in a fine painting;” and Colonel H. Stuart Wortley proved that the copy of Turner’s “Old Téméraire” was not only “retouched,” but wrongly translated, as the various shades of yellow in the original picture were represented in the copy as if they had been all of the same tint. Mr. Sawyer made use of the phrase “reproduction of colours,” but that was an error. He should have said—and undoubtedly meant—translation of colours, for photography is, unfortunately, incapable of reproducing colours. Among Mr. Sawyer’s examples was a curious and contradictory evidence that isochromatic plates translated yellow tints better than ordinary bromide plates, yet wrongly, for three different shades of yellow were translated as if they had been all one tint. I had noticed this myself when copying paintings and coloured prints, but in photographing the natural colours of fruits and flowers the result was different, and I attributed the mal-translation of pigment yellows to the amount of white with which they had been mixed by the painter. Be that as it may, I always obtained the best translation from natural colours, and a group of flowers which contained a beautiful sulphur coloured dahlia illustrates and confirms this statement in a most remarkable and satisfactory manner. It is, therefore, the more to be regretted that there is any restriction placed upon the individual experiment and development of this interesting aspect of photography.
This was the year of The International Inventions Exhibition, and the photographic feature of which was the historical collection exhibited by some of the members of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, and I think that collection was sufficiently interesting to justify my giving, in these pages, the entire list as published in the Photographic Journal:—
“We subjoin a full and complete statement of the whole of the exhibits, with the names of the contributors:—
“Capt. Abney, R.E., F.R.S.—Papyrotype process, executed at the School of Military Engineering, Chatham.
“W. Andrews—Wet collodion negatives, intensified by the Schlippes salt method.
“T. and R. Annan—Calotype process (negative and print), taken by D. O. Hill.
“F. Beasley, jun.—Collodio-albumen negatives.
“W. Bedford—One of Archer’s first cameras for collodion process, stereoscopic arrangement by Archer to fit a larger camera.
“Valentine Blanchard—Instantaneous views, wet collodion, 1856-65. Illustrations of a method of enlargement, as proposed by V. Blanchard, 1873. Modification of the Brewster stereoscope by Oliver Wendell Holmes.