Dear Sir,
Many thanks for your kind attention in sending me your Photogenic specimens<1> which I shall return in a few days after shewing them to Lord Gray <2> and some of my friends here who have felt a deep interest in the new art. They are very interesting especially the Lace one.<3>
I got your Initials<4> free of Expence. Our Scotch Postmasters could not comprehend the art of valuing three Letters at 12 shillings.
I must now in return for your kindness, make you acquainted with another new Art namely that of Painting Pictures upon Blood which reached me by the same post which brought me your specimens of the black art. The following is an extract from a letter from Sir John Robison <5> on the subject.
“A curious circumstance has been pointed out here by Dr Abercromby <6> & by Sir Pk Newbiggings Sen <7> viz, that if Blood drawn from the veins of a person in an inflammatory condition, & received in China Cups having patterns containing Green flowers, or ornaments of which some portions are Green, be allowed to coagulate, and then be turned out with the bottom upward, it will be found that while the general mass of the coagulum has assumed the dark colour of clotted blood, those portions of the surface which have been in contact with the green portions of the pattern will be of a bright vermillion, and the representation of the pattern will be so correctly given that a person who has not seen the Cup is able to draw an outline from the vermillion representation on the Coagulum”. – Is not this done by light? For the enamel between the China Cup & the Green colouring matter must interrupt any Chemical action.
I should like much to learn your secret; but you must fix the time when I may break silence.<8>
Have you not made a Map of the Solar Lines on your prepared paper? This is surely practicable. I shall repeat to you the expts which I may make.
I am Dear Sir Ever Most Faithfully yrs
D Brewster
St Leonard’s
St Andrews
Feby 12th 1839
Henry Fox Talbot Esqr
44 Queen Ann Street
London
Notes:
1. Photogenic drawing.
2. Francis Gray, 14th Lord Gray of Kinfauns (1765–1842), near Perth.
3. See Doc. No: 03772 and Doc. No: 03854 for references to WHFT sending photogenic drawings of lace to other scientific friends, with at least some hope that a commercial application might be found.
4. ie, his first specimens.
5. Sir John Robison (1778–1843) had succeeded Brewster as secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he was a fellow. He had accompanied Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792–1871), astronomer & scientist and Prof James David Forbes (1809–1868), Scottish scientist to Paris early in 1839 to see Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), French artist, showman & inventor’s photographs, and considered them far superior to photogenic drawings. [See H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot (London: Hutchinson Benham, 1977), p. 121.
6. John Abercrombie (1780–1844), eminent Edinburgh physician.
7. See Patrick S. K. Newbiggings, ‘On certain Circumstances affecting the Colour of Blood during Coagulation’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, v. 17 no. 15, pp. 263–264, read at the meeting held on 15 April 1839.
8. See Doc. No: 03820 for WHFT’s reservations about Brewster’s showing the examples to friends before the process had been fully described. WHFT discussed his process in broad conceptual terms at the meeting of the Royal Society held on 31 January 1839. He did not publicly disclose the manipulative details of his process until the meeting of 21 February 1839. This paper, ‘An Account of the Processes employed in Photogenic Drawing’, was later published in the Society’s Proceedings; interested parties would have seen the details first in the account of the meeting in the Athenæum, no. 591, 23 February 1839, p. 156.