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The photographic news
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- 35.1891
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- Bandzählung
- No. 1687, January 2, 1891
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The photographic news
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and, indeed, often doubtful as to the name of the person. There must have been a great number of itinerant portraitists going about the country in those days. I happen to know one or two of these old country mansions or halls. As is often the case in these days of agricultural depression, the occupiers are not the owners, and take their ancestors on lease with the house and furniture, which is, perhaps, better than buying them in Wardour Street. It affords more variety; you can get a fresh set of ancestors every time you change house. In the one I have now in my mind’s eye the portraits are very good, beginning with the dark and sensual face of Charles II., who visited the place. There are many Lely’s and Kneller's (what immense portrait manufactories these popular painters must have had), after which, as usual, they become anonymous. There is the usual handsome captain, time of Queen Anne, attitudinising before the spectator; the dean in gown and bands, without whom no gentleman’s family could be complete ; the county squire ; and the co-heiress twins. In another house the portraits are nearly all of the last century, as though the family began and ended in that period. This, however, is not the case, for there are still successors in existence. Can it be that the portraiture of the first half of the present century was too bad to encourage or to keep ? There were a few good portraitists, as we all know, seventy or eighty years ago—the successors of Gainsborough and Reynolds ; but from examples one sometimes meets with, the ordinary oil portrait must have been very bad. We are told that when things come to their worst they mend. It is a fact that middle-class portraiture of the time was sometimes so bad that ordinary people, who could not afford to employ the fashionable painters, Lawrence, Raeburn, Romney, Opie, or Shee, had, in despair, to have recourse to the humble silhouette. The popularity of this precursor of the photographic portrait for many years was marvellous. It was to be found in every home, both high and low, just as the photo graph is now, but not, of course, to so great an extent. They began to be popular in the early years of the last century, and lasted up to the introduction of photography, and were never more popular than between 1830 and 1850. It is darkest before the dawn. I believe it would be now still easier to find a silhouetter than a Daguerreotypist. It is a curious satire on fads, crazes, and fashions in art that even these black sticking-plaster portraits have been held up, if not as the highest art, as preferable to the work of the legitimate portrait painter, just as the “impression” of the present-time naturalistic is preached up by some latter-day enthusiasts as being superior to great art. In 1780, a German follower of Lavater, as quoted by Mr. Tuer in the Emjlish Illustrated Magazine, wrote a volume in which he claimed the shadow portrait as a specimen of true art when compared with the “ daub of the day” (the day of Reynolds, of Romney, and of Raeburn!) “This art,” he says, “is older than any other. In Arcadie itself silhouettes were drawn. The shepherds of that golden age, in their happy simplicity, traced shadows of their beloved on the sand—to worship in absence. From silhouettes came cartoons, then mono chrome, and, finally, painting. The most perfect in the order of things displaces the less perfect. But now, again, since this new culture of physiognomy, silhouettes are asked for, since these give a truer idea than the daubs of the ignorant. The taste of man has revolted against affectation and returned to the simple.” Silhouettes gave rise to the invention of the profile machine, a rod working on a pivot or universal joint. The long arm was passed over the profile while the pencil in the short arm marked the likeness. Photographers are not, then, the first to take portraits by machinery, and the profile-machinists were patronized by Royalty—or said they were—like some photographers. We are in the habit of considering and talking of the enormous number of photographic portraits produced each year, and photographers have a right to boast of their output, if not of their quality; but the portrait painters, also, must have been most productive, in some cases, indeed, beyond belief. Michael Jansen Mirevelt, a contemporary of Rembrandt, is credited with having painted the largest number of portraits. Besides a number of altar-pieces, he is estimated by Descamps to have painted 10,000 portraits; this pro digious number is, however, limited by Houbraken to 5,000. Taking the lesser number, and giving him forty years’ work, he must have averaged over two heads a day, which, as Euclid says, is absurd. As he seldom painted a portrait of a less size than 30 by 20, his hands must have been full. Lely and Kneller had wholesale businesses, but the great painters of the latter half of the last century —Reynolds and Gainsborough—numerous as their pro ductions appear to us, could have counted their pictures by hundreds only. I remember several itinerant painters who visited country towns before the advent of photography—or, rather, before it became available for portraiture. They usually began by taking a portrait of the beadle in his gorgeous livery; everybody knew the beadle, and this was a capital adver tisement, which never failed to bring in sitters. Photo graphy has altered all that. The itinerant has vanished, and English portrait painting has resumed its former glories. Who shall say that this revival is not due, in some measure, to the impetus given by our more humble art? SOME OF THE TENDENCIES IN PHOTOGRAPHIC ART* BY PHILIP H. NEWMAN. Now it may be asked, why is it, then, that rough papers are used ? Surely the photographers know something of this rule of scale, if amateurs do not! They, many of them, do know, but they are on the horns of a dilemma, and this is the real crux of the matter. Much as the old albumen silver print is despised, none of the new pro cesses of printing quite supply its place in range of tones; the reason being that lack of transparency in platinum and bromide papers, and, necessarily, incident in all matt sur faces. Photographers, feeling this, have endeavoured to mitigate the evil by breaking up their printing surfaces, and letting light into them by using rough papers, and that regardless of the scale which I have pointed out. We are all charmed by a chalk or charcoal drawing, be cause of this transparency in the shadows given equally by diagonal lines as by roughness of surface, and it is, of course, wished to realise this charm in photography if possible. Since the introduction of the carbon process especially, photographers have been further stimulated by the reproduction of drawings, etchings, and engravings, * Concluded from p. 1003, vol. xxxiv.
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