Collingwood <1>
June 19/40
My dear Sir
I am very much obliged indeed by your very very beautiful Photographs.– It is quite delightful to see the art grow under your hands in this way. Had you suddenly a twelvemonth ago been shewn them, how you would have jumped & clapped hands (ie. if you ever do such a thing).
That which pleased me most is I think (for it is difficult to chuse) the garden scene with trees & trellis. <2> It is so very unlike any drawing– and then, the difficulty of doing foliage at all.– Then the corner of a sunny wall with garden tools.– How admirably the broom shews – & the shine of the spade. <3> As a drawing the old back-front of Lacock Abbey with the pile of wood <4> strikes me as very finished.
I shall be very glad of any of your remarks on my paper. <5> – There is nothing I regret more than the loss of this unique season for prosecuting the subject of the thermographs. I may mention however that in one very imperfect extt on Rock-salt, I saw reason to believe that Melloni’s con-clusions as to the perfect transcalescence of that medium requires revision – and as I have now got some fine crystals of it I hope ere the season goes quite by to be able to try these expts better.
Belie
I must observe that the last specns you sent me have changed by keeping. One in particular that which seemed to me the best – the reflexion of your Abbey in the river has been altered partially thus
A retains its pristine tints [illustration]
B (by the mere superposn of a piece of some paper whose form does not correspond to that of any other of the pictures (tho’ I laid them all together) has grown very much lighter, marked by a sharp outline – with this effect as originating in a paper in esse <6> superposed – I am familiar but the case in question seems to refer to a paper in fuisse or in posse. <7>
Believe me my dear sir Yours truly
JFW Herschel
Notes:
1. Hawkhurst, Kent.
2. The “Garden at Lacock Abbey” was made on 1 June 1840; Herschel’s print of it is now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Eo56-10; the negative for this image is reproduced in Schaaf, Sun Pictures Three; The Harold White Collection… (New York: Hans P. Kraus, 1987), p. 29. Schaaf 2442
3. WHFT titled the image of the sunny wall ‘Wall in Melon Ground'. Herschel’s print is now in the collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Eo56-14; Schaaf 2416.
4. There are two negatives that fit this description. The image is probably ‘Honeysuckle Shed, Lacock Abbey’, taken 9 April 1840; Herschel’s print of this is in the HRHRC (964:054:003); Schaaf 3696. It could, however, also be ‘N front Abbey, in woodyard’, taken 31 May 1840, but no Herschel-owned print of this has been located; Schaaf 2439. WHFT’s negative list is in the Fox Talbot Collection, the British Library.
5. John Frederick William Herschel, ‘On the Chemical Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Preparations of Silver and Other Substances, Both Metallic and Non-metallic, and on Some Photographic Processes,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1840, pp. 1–59.
6. Actually.
7. Herschel is familiar with the effect, but he notes here to WHFT that none of the sheets of paper in his hands matches the discolouration on the print, thus leading to the conclusion that the seeds for discolouration were sown by a piece of paper coming into contact with the print before it was given to him, that is, in WHFT’s hands.