Pictures can in this manner be transferred to plates, china and ornaments of every description.
Various methods of printing on silk and various fabrics have from time to time been given. Perhaps the best for our purpose is the primuline process, as various colored images can be produced, with but little trouble, on all kinds of material. A description of the process will be found in another part of this work. (See Page [39].)
These the amateur can hand over to his better half or female relations, who with the natural feminine abilities will produce all sorts of pretty artistic articles for decorating the room.
We are well aware that we have by no means enumerated one half of the various means in which photography can be employed for decorating the house, but hope at least to have given the reader some idea of what its capabilities are.
[LEAF PRINTS.]
FIG. 26.—LEAF PRINT. BY T. GAFFIELD.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of form and structure of the leaves of different plants. Ruskin observes: "Leaves take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whirls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths; endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same, from footstalk to blossom, they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness and take delight in outstripping our wonder." Photography has placed in our hands a simple method of preserving facsimiles of their ever varying shapes that will last long after the leaf has died and crumbled to dust. Although the discovery of the darkening action of silver chloride when exposed to light was discovered by Scheele as far back as 1777, little was apparently known of the possibilities attending the discovery until 1839, when Fox Talbot read a paper on "A Method of Photogenic Drawing," in which he described various experiments that could be made with paper coated with this substance, and showed many pictures of leaves, ferns, and pieces of lace which he had obtained.