St Leonards
>May 1st
1841
Dear Sir,
Many thanks for your obliging letter. I fear one or two of my letters have not reached you, as I am confident not one of your letters have been left unanswered. I did not acknowledge the receipt of your two Printed Letters <1> from the Athenæum; <2> but I am positive that I thanked you for the two interesting Portraits <3> which you were so kind as to send me.
Had I thought that you had retained your plans of taking out a patent <4> I would not have troubled you with my last letter, as it is essential to the success of your Patents that there be no previous publication. But I had inferred from something I had read or heard that you had given up the Idea of a Patent.
You are quite right in saying that you requested only a Quarter’s delay. <5> By another Quarter I meant, not two, but one after the Quarter in which my Review <6> was to have been written. Your suggestion of an Appendix will I think remove the difficulty; and I beg that you will not at all even consider yourself as under any obligation to send me any information till you can do it with perfect security to your Patents, and till it is otherwise convenient to you. I write this in great haste, regretting that I should have plagued you on the subject from my anxiety for the Review.
I am Dear Sir Ever Most Truly yrs
D Brewster
Notes:
1. W. H. F. Talbot, Two Letters on Calotype Photogenic Drawing (reprinted from the Literary Gazette). His original letters were of 5 February 1841, ‘Fine arts. Calotype (Photogenic) Drawing’, published in the The Literary Gazette and Journal of belles lettres, science and art, no. 1256, 13 February 1841, p. 108; and of 19 February 1841, published in no. 1258, 27 February 1841, pp. 139–140.
2. The Athenaeum (London).
3. In September 1840, photographic portraiture, in paper processes, had been made possible by the discovery of the calotype process. Five early photographic portraits by WHFT can be found in Brewster’s album. For these images see: ‘A Man Standing in a Doorway’, taken 1840 or 1841, reproduced in Graham Smith, Disciples of Light: Photographs in the Brewster Album (Malibu: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), p. 140; ‘Lady Elisabeth Feilding’, taken August 1841, reproduced in Disciples of Light, p. 32; ‘Lady Elisabeth Feilding as Paolina Borghese’, Schaaf 3693, taken 20 April 1842, reproduced in Disciples of Light, p. 136; ‘Workman at Lacock’, taken 9 April 1842, reproduced in Disciples of Light, p. 137; and ‘Nicolaas Henneman’, taken 1842 or 1843, reproduced in Disciples of Light, p. 37.
4. On the calotype process.
5. That is, Doc. No: 04147. [See also Doc. No: 04252].
6. See Doc. No: 04141.