1 HILLSIDE CRESCENT
EDINBURGH
Feb. 24, 1863
My dear Sir,
Herewith I have the pleasure of sending for your kind acceptance the spare Russian photographs which I mentioned yesterday. They are mostly very indifferent, or even positively bad, as photographs; but being transparent positives on glass, & unmounted, they may perhaps be useful to you in some of your experiments in photoglyphy or otherwise. They are all of them from my own original negatives, & are as yet unpublished: their subjects are as detailed on the next leaf.
Subjects of photographs taken in Russia in the summer of 1859.
No 1. Senate House & Peter Statue from the Observatory tower of the Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg.
No 2. New church of the Saviour, Moskva, from the <Spanow?> Hills at a distance of about 3 miles.
No 3. The same, with part of the <Devikchei?> convent.
No 4 Part of Gateway town in the Kitai Gorod, Moskva, & cross of the Church of the Mother of God of Vladimir.
No 5 Crosses & golden domes of the Church of the Mother of God of Georgia. Kitai Gorod, Moskva.
No 6 Simeonovskië Monastery, Moskva.
No 7, The Kreml of Moskva, from the East.
No 8 The Kreml of Moskva from the South.
No 9 The Ivan Veliki Bell tower in <the?> Kreml of Moskva.
No 10 River side of Kreml, of Moskva, from the East
No 11 Two panels of the brazen gates of <Kersow?>, at Novgorod.
No 12. Starai Goroditchi, (from the Bell tower of the Kreml of Novgorod), the birthplace of the Russians as a nation under Rurik, in 862 A.D.
NB In Nos. 7 to 10, note the rendering of the silver, versus the golden, domes.
Hoping to have the honour of your visit on Friday at 4.30 P.M. as arranged yesterday I remain
Yours very truly
C. Piazzi Smyth