Dear Sir,
I return you many thanks for the very beautiful Photogenic drawings you have been so good as to send me. The larger drawing of Lacock Abbey is particularly interesting to me both as a specimen of the great power of the art, and as recalling the many happy hours I spent within its walls. <1>
You have surely not published the precise method <2> of executing these drawings. If you have not you would oblige, at a leisure hour by mentioning the process.– I believe I possess every thing you have written on the subject, and yet I feel that I could not produce any thing like your present specimens.
I hope you intend being at the next meeting of the Association <3> in Glasgow:
I am Dear Sir Ever Most Faithfully yrs
D Brewster
St Leonards
St Andrews
Jany 20th 1840.
Notes:
1. See Doc. No: 03431.
2. Talbot publicly disclosed the manipulative details of his process at the meeting of the Royal Society of London on 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. However, because of variations in the composition of paper and in the purity of chemicals, some experimenters failed with the process.
3. The British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1840, the annual meeting was to be held in Glasgow from 17 September.