Sixty Years of Photographs

The Weekly Machen

The following article could be easily considered an unremarkable assignment for Arthur Machen, and perhaps a waste of his time and talents. As usual, Machen does admirably, although this subject probably did not interest him much beyond an opportunity to reflect on bygone days. Yet, such stories were no doubt welcomed by readers wearied by stories about the ongoing war and a rest for those men, like Machen, who wrote of it.

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Sixty Years of Photographs:
The Early Victorian and His Album
by
Arthur Machen
May 5, 1916

What would have happened to Miss La Creevy if she had not married Tim Linkinwater? I never knew, I never sounded the obscure question as to the fate of the old miniature painters when first the tentative daguerreotype and then the accomplished photograph came upon them. I found the solution of the problem by accident the other day; not perhaps a general solution, but at all events an answer that fits one particular case.

Messrs. Maull and Fox, the photographers of Piccadilly, are celebrating the sixtieth year of their business, and the reigning Mr. Maull was telling me all about it. I began by asking him if his firm had ever produced daguerreotypes. I have a vivid recollection of a daguerreotype of my father as a mild whiskered curate in a gilt frame. The fun was that if you held your daguerrotype at a certain slant to the light the hair appeared to grow white as snow, and the face became black as an Ethiopian’s—the thing turned to a negative before your eyes. Had Messrs. Maull and Fox any of their early daguerreotypes to show me?

How Photography Began

”We never did any daguerrotypes; we came just after the daguerrotype period. You see, my uncle, Mr. Henry Maull, was a portrait and miniature painter at the address in Piccadilly. I may say that we still paint miniatures and portraits.

“But in the early ‘fifties there was Dr. Polyblank, a scientific man with a particular interest in the chemistry of photograph. Sir William Crookes had discovered the process of making a glass plate sensitive to light—the wet plate—and Dr. Polyblank suggested to my uncle that the new process would help him in his miniature painting. Why not have one sitting, take a photograph, and then work from it, and save the client the trouble of several sittings?

“This was done. At first (in 1854) the photographs were merely used as aids to painting. Then customers began to ask for copies. Dr. Polyblank was taken into partnership, and the photographic history of the firm began.”

Then we went into a matter that has always interested me. I can remember very vividly the photographic albums of long ago that lived in the drawing-room. (Does anybody keep photographic albums in drawing-rooms nowadays?) They were fat, squat books—I should think the size, technically, must have been “pott quarto,” and they were full of uncles and aunts and grandmothers and cousins in “carte de visite” size. The women had crinolines, the men wore queer-looking frockcoats; but, men and women alike, all were jaundiced, all these old photographs were sicklied into a dingy yellow. Why were they yellow?

Aunt Jane in Her Crinoline

There is another point about the contents of the old albums. At the present time your photograph—usually head and shoulders only—looms out of the void, it stands against an indeterminate background. In the old days things were done differently. Aunt Jane in the crinoline sat elegantly on a chair, and beside her was a table. Perhaps it had a vase of flowers on it, at which the sitter gazed pensively, perhaps she “croched,” sometimes she perused attentively the pages of a book which, one always knew, was a very “nice” book. As for Uncle John in the buttoned-up frock coat, he stood with one hand on a marble occasional table; there was a pillar on one side of him, a curtain falling in heavy folds on the other, and a scenic landscape was faintly indicated in the distance.

I spoke to Mr. Maull of these scenes and properties as things of the past, and asked if they had been taken over by photography from the traditions of portrait painting—I was thinking of a school that flourished c. 1820-40: “Sir Thomas Aldersgate, Kt.” showing behind Sir Thomas a noble classic column, a rich curtain of velvet, and a thunderstorm raging over the distant landscape.

‘‘I suppose,” said Mr. Maull, “that these studio accessories were derived from the traditions of portrait painting; but you are mistaken in thinking that they have disappeared; we often use them to take a sitter full length. Officers in the Army, and Navy, people in court dress, both men and women, like to have every detail of their costume represented in the photograph. The ‘accessories’ are not so much in use as formerly, it is true; we should hardly be asked to take a photograph now in this style.”

“The Best People” and Their Style

This style showed a Scottish duke c. 1870. He was in full Highland dress, one foot rested on a property boulder, behind him was a wild mountainous landscape; an elaborate piece of scenic art.

“Still, a sitter taken in levee dress often likes to have some sort of ‘palace surroundings,’ and we have them ready. We keep a quarter-deck set for naval officers and a table is almost a necessity for a general in full uniform. He must have something to put his cocked hat on.”

I looked round the pictures on the walls and found that it was so. Here were photographs of “the best people,” and in many cases they stood, full-length, amidst “accessories”—the old tables and balustrades and pillars and curtains that I had thought of as vanished for ever.

So, amidst the storms and changes of these troublesome times, the waves of revolution beat in vain against the Pillar, the Table, the Curtain, and the Balustrade of the photographic studio.

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