Fig. 4. Fowling (see [p. 27])
V.—THE PHOTOGRAPHIC COPY OF THE ORIGINAL.
ON the 3rd of August 1871 the Lords of the Committee of Council on Education agreed to Mr. Joseph Cundall going to Bayeux to obtain permission to take a full-sized photograph of the Tapestry. Permission having been obtained, a highly-skilled photographer, Mr. E. Dossetter, went to Bayeux for the purpose. In the first instance quite small photographs were taken, which were subsequently enlarged to the size of the original. A complete photographic copy enlarged to full-size and coloured after the original was exhibited in the Albert Hall at the Exhibition of 1873. This is the copy that is now exhibited in the Museum (Gallery 79).
What Carlyle thought of this copy cannot fail to be of interest—he expresses his enthusiasm in a letter to Sir Henry Cole:—
“I went yesterday with two companions for a look at your Bayeux Tapestry in the Albert Hall and I cannot but express to you at once my very great contentment with what I saw there. The enterprise was itself a solid, useful and creditable thing; and the execution of it seems to me a perfect success far exceeding all the expectations I have entertained about it. Mr. Froude, who was one of my companions, was full of admiration, and a brother of mine who had seen the Tapestry itself at Bayeux last year seemed to think that this copy you had managed to make (I hope in a permanent and easily repeatable manner) was superior in vivid clearness, beauty of colour, etc., to the very original. As the work is in essence photographic, I flatter myself you have preserved the negative and other apparatus whereby the thing can be repeated as often as you like and at a moderate expense—in which case it might with evident and great advantage be imparted in the same complete form to all British Colonies, and even in America itself would be precious to every inquiring and every cultivated mind. In a word, I am much obliged to you for sending me to see this feat of yours (by far the reasonablest in completeness of its kind yet known to me), and very much obliged above all for your having done it and so done it.
“Yours truly, with many thanks,
“T. CARLYLE.”