Heathfield. <1>
June 4th 1841.
My dear Sir
I return you many, many thanks for your prompt kindness in sending me the note to M. Biot, <2> and for the beautiful Calotypes, with which I was really delighted the marble head <3> is equal to one of M. Angelo’s drawings, and the small bit of Laycock wonderfully pictorial and strong, also the large one of the back yard – sunny in the extreme, the foliage I think brighter than any one on silver <4> that I have seen.
These specimens have charmed me so much that I am very anxious to learn the method before we go. You can best tell me whether any oral instruction is very necessary (in many such cases it is) if it shd be so I would take advantage of your kind offer of speaking to me on the subject.
We propose leaving here <5> the 19th and to go from Southampton to Havre, but as Mrs Jones wishes to stay 2 days at Clifton <6> I might run up to London if you shd be there on the 20 and 21st should it be desirable to do so.
I should imagine that a stock of best English paper wd be at all events a sine quâ non; <7> my only apology for intruding on your valuable time is the great interest I take in the subject, and the just appreciation of very high services, unrivalled in my opinion to the cause of art
yours very truly
Calvert R Jones Jnr
Notes:
1. The residence of Jones at Swansea.
2. Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862), French scientist, to whom WHFT send a description of the calotype process on the 28th of May. [See Doc. No: 04263].
3. Probably these three photographs are the ones preserved in Jones’s album: ‘Oriel Window at Lacock Abbey’ (1840), ‘Head of Patroclus’ (1840) and ‘Lacock Abbey on October14th, 1840’. Reproduced in Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Pictures Catalogue Five: The Reverend Calvert R. Jones (New York: Hans P. Kraus, Jr, Inc, 1990), pp. 20, 21, 22.
4. Up to this point, Jones had mostly used the daguerreotype process.
5. Jones was going on a tour of Italy with his wife, Anne, and their daughter, Christina.
6. Clifton, Bristol, on the Avon Gorge.
7. The essential.