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316 THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. [July 3, 1868. M. Tessie da Motay, a gentleman well known as a photo grapher and photo-lithographer, has discovered an easy and cheap method of obtaining oxygen, which is now being employed for furnishing gas for some oxy-hydrogen lime lights now under trial at Paris. Four candelabra have been erected upon the square in front of the Hotel de Ville for the purpose of thoroughly testing this mode of illumina tion. M. du Motay produces his oxygen at the rate of sevenpence per cubic yard ; by passing a current of hot air over manganate of potash he converts that material into permanganate, from which the oxygen is readily generated by treatment with super-heated steam. M. Geymet recently calls attention in the Monitcur de la Photographie to the fact that he is able to prepare for com mercial purposes the transparent sensitive film upon which, as he some time ago stated, photographic impressions may be printed, and afterwards transferred to a suitable support. The mode employed appeared to be a modification of the collodio-chloride process. The latter may consist of coloured paper, or of a leaf of metal—as, for instance, of gold or silver ; and inasmuch as the photograph itself is perfectly trans parent, even in the deepest shadows, a very pleasing result may thus be obtained, provided the nature or colour of the support is in keeping with the character of the picture. M. A. de Constant writes to the Archie in warm praise of Steinheil’s new aplanatic lens for groups and landscape pic tures. He has been able by its means to secure good results with coffee dry plates, with an exposure of from 12 to 15 seconds only, the plates being at the time a week or ten days old ; the soft outlines of mountains twelve miles distant, as likewise the details of the foreground, are equally well rendered by the lens. M. Dubost, of Dsseldorff, has been very successful in the production of excellent negatives by the coffee process ; they are both brilliant and harmonious, and developed by means of an acid solution, made up according to the following formul :— No. 1.—Water ... parts Pyrogallic acid 1 part Citric acid 4 , No. 2.—Water 100 parts Nitrate of silver G „ Citric acid 6 ,, The solutions are mixed together for use. PICTORIAL EFFECT IN PHOTOGRAPHY ; Being Lessons in Composition and CIAEOSCURA for Photographers. BY H. P. ROBINSON. Chapter XXIII. " Fit it with such furniture as suits The greatness of his person.” Shakespeare. “It shall be so my care To have you royally appointed, as if The scene you play were mine.” Shakespeare. Backgrounds and Accessories. Perhaps in no other one part of their art have photographers so outraged nature as in the choice of accessories and the make-up of their pictures. Let me turn over the leaves of an album, and describe one or two of the pictures contained therein. No. 1. A portrait of a lady in an evening dress, walking on the sea-shore; in consideration of her thin shoes, that part of the sands on which she is standing is carpeted. No. 2 represents a veteran photographer standing on a terrace. The terrace is carpeted, and on it stand a pedestal and column, round which is festooned a curtain elaborately tied up in various places with cord and enormous tassels. The distant landscape is delicately and well done, but adds force to the absurdity of the curtain in the open air. No. 3. A gentleman standing before a profile balustrade and pillar, with landscape behind representing distant mountains. The light on the figure is from the right, that on the balustrade from the left. The shadow of the column falls on the distant mountains, which are much more clearly defined than the head of the figure. No. 4. A lady reading at a window, but the light comes from the opposite direction. The shadow of the window curtain falls on the sky. No. 5 represents a gentleman with a gas chandelier, globes and all, sprouting out of the top of bis head. There are one hundred pictures in the book, many of them from the most popular studios. There is a column or balus trade in seventy-eight of these cartes. And yet photographers accurately represent nature! A curtain is allowable because it is possible, but the use of the column is open to very grave doubt, and the two together are so exceedingly improbable as to be almost absurd. It is true, the employment of these accessories as a background is to be found in the pictures of some great painters, but the tricks of one art may not be applicable to another. The column and curtain are conventional. Now conventionalities may be right in an art like painting, where a good deal of license has been allowed, and has become sanctioned by custom, but photography is a new art, the results of which are taken direct from nature, and is without precedents. It is an art in which departure from truth becomes absurd. We, the workers in the first quarter century of its existence, are the makers of precedents: let us be careful, then, that they are not misleading and dangerous ones. Photography is the most imitative of all the arts, and photographers the greatest imitators, as they have shown by the way they have followed and adopted much that is bad in painters ; and perhaps the worst of these imitations has been this column-and-curtain conventionality fo‘‘most of their sitters, when it is probable that few under the rank of those who dwell in palaces ever naturally have the oppor tunity of being in the neighbourhood of such accessories. In painted pictures the column is shown with some chance of possibility, but the way it has been used in photography has been ridiculous and absurd, it generally being placed on a carpet. Now everybody must be open to the conviction that marble or stone pillars are not built on carpets or oil cloth for a foundation. But there was a lower depth. Wooden columns were not bad enough, nor cheap enough, so recourse was had to imitations of these sham pillars manu factured out of flat boards and canvas, and painted in per spective that looked every way for the point of sight without being ever able to discover it; if any of the lines were right, it was on the principle that makes a clock that does not go, right at one second of the day at least. The violent light is often represented as coming from the opposite direction to that which illuminated the figure. Then, by a stroke of genius, somebody extended the application of these profile slips to the representation of other objects, such as chairs, on which, being flat, it was im possible to sit down, pianofortes, fireplaces, French windows, and everything that was capable of being caricatured in this manner. But the “crowning glory ” of this kind of sham furniture was the multuminparvo, or “ universal,” that Protean construction which was at one minute a pianoforte and at another a bookcase—a sort of economical houseful of furniture in one piece. This was certainly an im provement on the slips, and if manufacturers would only add a little taste to their cabinet work, suppress the rococo ornamentation, and make them much plainer, they may be of use where the very best work is not necessary. But if the photographer has any pride in his art, if he desires to do the best that can be done, he must eschew imi tations, and have nothing in his studio but genuine furni ture of the best kind, and of good design and character. When the photographer is furnishing, he would find it a good plan to fit up, not only his studio, but his reception rooms also, with chairs of different patterns—a “ Harlequin Set,"