Dear Sir,
I am delighted with the specimens <1> you have been so good as to send me; but I long for a Portrait.
I look forward with impatience to the perfection of the Art in your hands, and I would advise you not to disclose your secret in a hurry. You can easily authenticate your claim to the discovery by sending a sealed packet to the Royal Society. <2>
I have got a very fine Camera constructed by Mr Thomas Davison 12 Royal Exchange Edinr [Edinburgh],<3> who has executed Daguerreotype pictures far superior, in the estimation of foreigners & others, to those executed by Daguerre.<4> I have two of them of scenes in Edinr, that are inexpressibly fine, but notwithstanding their beauty, your Photogenic drawings are most generally admired.
When you have published your method I shall immediately apply it to our beautiful ruins here which are well adapted for the purpose. – We have also grand & precipitous coasts which will be easily taken.– Mr Davison took one of the shipping at Glasgow bridge which was much admired.<5>
I am, Dear Sir, Ever Most Faithfully Yours
D Brewster
St. Leonards
St Andrews
October 23d 1840
H.F. Talbot Esqr
Notes:
1. Of photographs made using WHFT's newly-discovered calotype negative process, where a latent image was developed by gallic acid. See Doc. No: 04147.
2. Royal Society of London.
3. Thomas Davidson (1798–1878), scientific instrument maker and Daguerreotypist; see Doc. No: 04163. He was the author of The Art of Daguerreotyping, with the Improvements of the Process and Apparatus (Edinburgh: 1841).
4. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), French artist, showman & inventor.
5. The harbour at the Broomielaw in Glasgow, the hub of the city’ Transatlantic trade, lay immediately below Telford’s New Glasgow Bridge of 1833–1835, over the River Clyde. Davison's view, likely a daguerreotype, has not been located.