link to Talbot Project home page link to De Montfort University home page link to Glasgow University home page
Project Director: Professor Larry J Schaaf
 

Back to the letter search >

Document number: 4490
Date: 21 Apr 1842
Dating: by pencil notation in an unidentified hand
Postmark: 21 Apr 1842
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: HERSCHEL John Frederick William
Collection: National Science and Media Museum, Bradford
Collection number: 1937-4900
Collection 2: PRIVATE
Collection 2 number: FT11409
Last updated: 21st February 2010

[The envelope for this letter is in a private collection:]
Henry Fox Talbot Esqr
Lacock Abbey
near Chippenham
Wilts

_________

My dear Sir

A great many thanks to you for the exquisite specimens of the Calotype which surpass anything I had heard of. The power of depicting scenes of conversation & acting between living persons is a wonderful stride. <1> The tour you are projecting in search of Architectural Specimens will be the most interesting thing imaginable. In a very few hours you will put on record all the details of a cathedral which would have cost a draftsman years of yore to execute with infinitely less fidelity.

I have not done much lately in photogy having been at work at my astronomical reductions and the flower season not being come on. - but within these two fine days I have made some considerable steps towards colour and have got at some very singular facts respecting the exceedingly definite action of a certain blue ray on the hydriodic papers.- I have succeeded in getting (at last) a very respectable green but unluckily it does not lie precisely in the green region of the spectrum, but lower, among the yellow & orange rays.- I perceive however that a perfect coloured spectrum though difficult no doubt is far from hopeless and I think I clearly see my way to the production of at least a passable one which if the present fine weather lasts another week I expect to hunt down, and in that case I shall probably be able to send you in return for your beautiful things some coloured impressions of coloured pictures.

Believe me
Dear Sir
Yours very truly

JFW Herschel


Notes:

1. Although this description could fit a number of WHFT's calotypes ,at least three possible examples once owned by Herschel survive. 'The Handshake', inscribed 'H.F.T. 1842', is in the collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (Eo56-2). Also Herschel's son, Captain John Herschel (1837-1921), military & scientist, donated two such images to the Science Museum, now in the NMeM, Bradford. One is an image of three men conversing in front of a backdrop, inscribed 'from the life, in one minute ¼, H.F. Talbot 1842' (1943-33/1); the second is an undated view of two men playing chess (1943-33/2).