1858 THE ATHENAEUM
Journal of English and foreign Literature, science, and the Fine Arts
1858 [no vol. #s]
ver: Jan. 26, 2011 (previously Oct. 28, 2009 (London)
--This journal does NOT have volume #s, only issue #s.
--This year of the journal is in TWO VOLUMES AND THE PAGE NUMBERS START OVER
--These articles have been transcribed directly from the originals in the V&A Art Library; NO copies made, some have been photographed. When articles were photographed, a reference has been made and beginning words transcribed to insure association of photos w/ bib. refs.
--Ads = only checked in spotty manner; they are listed together then they occur. More thorough search needed when time permits.
TO DO: Add bold to names
NOTES:
--Italics have been retained from publications, which use them for both titles as well as emphasis. To more easily locate image titles, I have continued this italicization when titles have been rendered in all capitols or put in quotes, however italics have NOT been used when the general subject of an image is mentioned.
--Spelling and typos: Nineteenth-century spellings occasionally differs from currently accepted norms. In addition, British spellings also differ from American usage. Common examples are: “colour” vs. “color”; “centre” vs. “center’” the use of “s” for “z” as in “recognise” vs. “recognize; and the use of one “l” instead of “ll” as in “fulfilment”. While great care has been exercised in transcribing the 19th-century journals exactly as printed, “spell check” automatically corrects many of these differences. An attempt has been made to recorrect these automatic changes, but no doubt some have slipped through. As for typographical errors, these have been checked although no doubt some have managed to slip through the editorial process. For matters of consequence, I will be happy to recheck the original sources if need be for specific references.
--Image numbers listed in articles can be either an entry number in an exhibition, or the photographer’s own image number as found on labels.
--All names have been bolded for easy location. Numbers frequently refer to the photographer’s image number, but can also refer to a number in a catalog for a show. Decide whether to bold or not if can tell.
--It is not always possible in lists of photographers to know when two separate photographers are partners or not, e.g., in a list, “Smith and Jones” sometimes alludes to two separate photographers and sometimes to one photographic company. Both names will be highlighted and indexed but a partnership may be wrongly assumed. Any information to the contrary would be appreciated.
-- Brackets [ ] are used to indicate supplied comments by the transcriber; parenthesis
( ) are used in the original sources. If the original source has used brackets, they have been transcribed as parenthesis to avoid confusion.
--“illus” means that I have the view mentioned and should be scanned and included.
--Articles by photographers about technical matters – when transcribed, only names and titles have been listed. If other names are associated with the paper they are listed as well.
--Meetings of Societies – Names of officers, members attending or referenced, dates and locations of meetings have been given. If the reports are very short or discuss photographs, then the articles have been copied; if administrative or technical in nature, they have not.
--“[Selection]” = This has been used when not all portions of a feature are copied, such as The Photographic News’ “Talk In The Studio”. If the word does not appear, then the entire feature was transcribed.
-- Some journals, e.g., The Art-Journal, cover both photographer and painting/drawing. As they frequently refer to the production of both the photographer and the painter as “pictures” it is not always possible to tell when photography is indicated. If there is doubt, it will be included but a note will be added stating that the names listed may in fact not be photographers.
--Mostly articles totally discussing technical aspects of photography, products, etc. are not transcribed unless they are part of a larger article covering photographs. When technical descriptions are too lengthy to transcribe that is noted.
--Cultural sensitivity – these are direct transcriptions of texts written in the 19th-century and reflect social comments being made at that time. Allowances must be made when reading some texts, particularly those dealing with other cultures.
1858: Athenaeum, Jan. 16, #1577, p. 86-87: photo made
Architectural Photographic Association.
[3 ½ col.;
col. 2 starts w/: “hooded men, with their three-legged”
col. 3 starts w/: “destroys life! Then, for contrast…”
col. 4 starts w/: “teresting as points of comparison”
1858: Athenaeum: Jan. 16, #1577, p. 88:
Ad:
Interesting Novelty.
In a few days, In One Vol., 450 pages, 20 Photo-stereographs, price 21s.
Teneriffe,
An Astronomer’s Experiment
[photographed incl. list of stereos]
1858: Athenaeum: Jan. 30, #1579, p. 140-143: PHOTOS MADE
Teneriffe, an Astronomer’s Experiment, or Specialities of a Residence above the Clouds. by C. Piazzi Smyth. Illustrated with Photo-stereographs (Reeve)
p. 140 – 1 col.
p. 141 = 3 col.:
col. 1 starts w/: “with their accompaniments…”
col. 2 starts w/: “velocity almost unprecedented…”
col. 3 starts 2/: “over the central ridge…”
p. 142 = 3 col.:
col. 1 starts w/: “Chasna, the figs…”
col. 2 starts w/: “fluid amongst microscopical…”
col. 3 starts w/: “blackened crags…”
p. 143 = 1 col., starts w/: “the south used to come…”
1858: Athenaeum: Feb. 20, #1582, p. 246: photo made
Fine Arts: Photographic Society [review of 5th annual exhibit]
[3 cols.,
col. 2 starts w/ “Clytie (531), the most exquisite…”
col. 3 starts w/ “both for subject and execution…”
1858: Athenaeum: March 20, #1586, p. 371-372:
Stereoscopes: Or, Travel Made Easy
The spontaneous engraving of Photography has united Science and Art. it furnishes the artist with suggestions and with momentary truths that memory could not have retained, or, if retained, would have debased or perverted. It accustoms the English mind of all classes to greater truth of drawing, more perfect light and shade;--it sends hordes of travelling artists to seek for new beauties, and to attempt fresh conquests in regions hitherto unknown to Art;--it essays, searches, tries experiments, all of which processes are developments and expansions, and, therefore, useful whatever they lead to. Even our inventors cannot have too large a capital of truth to start with.
But this vigorous young science, impatient of rest, has now turned traveler, and has gone abroad to verify or refute hasty, dull, o0r prejudiced writers—to enable us to talk with greater certainty of what we have hitherto not seen but only read of. The first-fruits of this praiseworthy energy and enterprise are 100 stereoscopic slides of Egypt and Nubia—cave and temple—bagged and brought home by Mr. F. Frith, an artist sent out by Messrs. Negretti & Zambra [this statement is in error; Frith was not sent by N&Z],--whose views of the Holy Land from Jerusalem to Mount Lebanon are also to be published as a Biblical comment which must interest the whole Christian world, who hitherto have had to depend on the pictorial statement of artists who too often, even if patient enough to report truly, or clear-eyed enough to see truly, would turn black into white, or round into square, for the sake of the pyramidal grouping and the central light, or such articles of the old creed. Mr. Frith, who makes light of everything, brings us the Sun’s opinion of Egypt, which is better than Denon’s, Champollion’s, Wilkinson’s, Eōthen’s, or Titmarsh’s. What an educational revolution is here, my countrymen! Why, our Tommys and Harrys will know the world’s surface as well as a circumnavigator before they are in “breekums,” and will be as blasés of Andes by the time they take to jackets, as we are now of Primrose Hill. What a stock of knowledge our Tommys and Harrys will begin life with! Perhaps in ten years or so the question will seriously be discussed—except to Crusoes and Benbows—whether it will be any use to travel now that you can send out your artist to bring home Egypt in his carpet-bag to amuse the drawing-room with?
Mr. Frith takes us a wonderful stereoscopic tour; though we go over it so quickly and cheaply,--by quarry, rock and temple, obelisk, sphinx, pyramid, and cataract, Nile-boat and sandbank,--we pass without firman and without trouble, reading, if we wish to do the complete Sybarite, our page of Anastasius or the Epicurean between each slide; or if we wish to be heavy and learned our Philo-Judæus, or the Koran’s Egyptian chapters, thinking of Shishak over our muffins, of Sesostris as we our out our tea, of Rameses as we fill our pipe,--and of the end of all when it breaks between our clumsy fingers.
There is not one of these views of Egypt but teaches us some new feature of Oriental life, or some fresh point of interest in the old marvels of the great brick-and-mortar-loving kinds. The flat roofs, sharp minarets, and towers ringed with balconies for the invoker to prayer, give us, for instance, new feelings about Cairo and its Saracenis tombs, with the fluted dome of the Memlook kinds; from the stone beehives, in one case, breached through the tumbled below the dark gap lies a moraine of kingly ruin, to the great bossy, knotted crocodile, thirty feet long, with sleepy, ferocious eye, and a yard of jagged mouth; or the zebra-striped sand-bank of the Blue River; or the tufted palms that wave anxiously and wonderingly round the grave of Osiris;--it is as new to us as if we had never heard of Egypt since Jacob went off thither with the red and yellow-turbaned Ishmaelites, whose camels are borne down with bales of Indian spice and Arabian myrrh. This is not the Egypt of the old masters, but the Egypt of the lotus-bud pillar,--the Egypt of Cleopatra and the asp, of Berenice, and the Ptolemies, of Ptha, and the faded Athor.
If stone had a soul, what a grand 3,000 years of thinking those Alp pillars of Denderah must have had of it; what quiet, hundred-year-long laughs at the brags of Cæsars and Pharaohs, all ground down now to the same yellow dust that blows in heavy drifts round the faded colours of the Karnac dumb-shows or the sluggish feet of that Memnon, who thinks music, but will not sing, though the Copt mock him with his dusky fingers! Mr. Frith has brought us home, in a fossil and imperishable state, those smooth, jelly-glass shaped granite rocks that fill the Nile’s bed round Philœ,--he gives us dim glimpses of Nubia and the Cataract between the slanting pylons of the temple-island,--examples of great unseated statues, prone and bedded in the soft, shaping dust that rises around them,--of the ribbed sand, specked with pebbles, like the sea-beach,--of basket-shaped capitals,--of the colossal faces of Abou Simbel, with the divine death-smile of eternal persistency, faith, love, and repose upon their granite lips. This is not the Egypt of panoramas, but, in a word, the Egypt of Genesis, of Herodotus, and of Quintus Curtius. We hardly miss the blue and orange, which is the livery of Egyptian nature, in Mr. Frith’s views, because his infallible art has caught the very burn of the Girgeh air and the cutting, transparent blackness of the Denderah shadows. it will hardly matter what great cleaner and re-framer sweeps up the rubbish of Egypt after half a century more of such observations as these. If Egypt ever sells off and begins again, its old tombstone-covered churchyard of nations will not be unrecorded or forgotten. Athor and Canopus live with us; as for Typhon, he is admitted to our firesides; Osiris is in our portfolios sewn together again; and Isis comes to us to spend the holidays.
As photographs these views of Mr. Frith are worthy of especial praise for their decision of touch, their sharp, clear brightness, and their delicious, sunny, silvery, or twilight tone. In some of the pillared halls of old temples, shaken by earthquake, the columns toppled and leaning against each other like so many disturbed nine-pins, the capricious effect of spots and patches of light is beyond all praise:--it is the perfect truth and vividness of strong sunshine in its daring moments, not in the mere breadth of Cuyp, or the glow of Claude, but in a far stranger, more fitful and momentary effect. We wish Messrs. Negretti & Zambra life to circumnavigate the world, and bring home fresh regions to our firesides for our luxurious profit and amusement.
1858: Athenaeum: April 17, #1590, p. 500: photo taken – can’t refind; scan if need
Our Weekly Gossip:
At the last meeting of the Astronomical Society, a very remarkable Daguerreotype of the recent eclipse was exhibited, made at Hinton, near Farringdon, by Mr. Williams, of Regent street. It attracted much attention, both for its great beauty as a work of Art, and for a remarkable phenomenon which it seized and recorded. About half an hour before the greatest obscuration, a mock sun appeared on the clouds, at some distance from the real luminary, and the daguerreotype was made while it remained visible. We hope Mr. Williams will make copies of this very curious appearance, and also furnish a full description of the appearance and its circumstances.
1858: Athenaeum: April 17, #1590, p. 500: photo taken
Our Weekly Gossip:
[Negretti & Zambra’s new catalogue; Frith noted as not the photographer]
1858: Athenaeum: May 29, #1596, p. 692-693:
Photographic Society
The fifth annual Exhibition of Photographs and Daguerreotypes…
[p. 693 = 2 col.
col. 1 starts w/: “clawed and netted…”
col. 2 starts w/: “tecchi, is interesting; so is the head…”
1858: Athenaeum: May 29, #1596, p. 694:
Fine-Art Gossip:
Several numbers of two rival photographic portrait serials are before us…
[2 col. 2nd col. is 3 lines and not photographed:
…mouth and investigating glance; the Earl of Rosse is smooth, portly and bland; Gibson, the sculptor, cold and abstracted.”
1858: Athenaeum: June 5, #1597, p. 725:
Fine-Art [review]
Warwickshire Illustrated: a History of some of the most Remarkable Places in the County of Warwick.
[2 col. = 2nd col. starts w/: “carved screens and monumental effigies…”
1858: Athenaeum: June 19, #1599, p. 788:
Our Weekly Gossip
M. Gaudet, a pupil of Daguerre […monostereoscope]
1858: Athenaeum: June 26, #1600, p. 618-619:
Our Library Table:
A Manual of Photographic Manipulation. by Lake Price
[2 col.; p. 619 col. 1 starts w/: “presenting themselves on collodion plate”
1585: Athenaeum: July 24, #1604, p. 115:
Fine-Arts Gossip.
Some admirable photographic portraits by Mr. Lake Price, of “Eminent British Artists…”
[2 col.; 2nd col. starts w.: “never seen but in shadow…”
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 7, #1606, p. 178: PHOTO TAKEN
Ad:
Stereoscopic Magazine [by Lovell Reeve][apparently avail. on Sept. 1]
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 14, #1607, p. 202:
Our Weekly Gossip
Dr. Diamond—whose services to heliographic science are well known—has been appointed Secretary to the Photographic Society. Dr. Diamond has for a long time past been one of the Vice-Presidents of this institution. It was impossible for the Society to have made a wiser choice.
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 28, #1609, p. 251:
Ads:
The Stereoscopic Magazine [small ad; PHOTO TAKEN]
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 28, #1609, p. 251:
Ads:
The Photographic Art-Journal [small ad; PHOTO TAKEN]
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 28, #1609, p. 251:
Ads:
A New Weekly Journal of Photography
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 28, #1609, p. 252: PHOTO TAKEN
Ads:
A Dictionary of Photography by Thomas Sutton
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 28, #1609, p. 252: PHOTO TAKEN
Ads:
Photography: its Educational and Practical Value: The Art-Journal for September
1858: Athenaeum: Aug. 28, #1609, p. 271-272: PHOTO TAKEN
Fine-Arts Gossip:
We have received six numbers of the illustrated Photographic Art-Journal…
p. 272, col. 1 starts w/: “—how fine the outline of the limbs…”
1858: Athenaeum: Sept. 11, #1611, p. 331: photo taken
Our Weekly Gossip:
Among the tourists who have been exploring Brittany… [Jephson/Lovell Reeve]
1858: Athenaeum: Sept. 18, #1612, p. 361: photo taken
Our Library Table:
Landscape Photography. By Joachim Otté
1858: Athenaeum: Oct. 2, #1614, p. 420: photo taken
Our Library Table
A Dictionary of Photography. By Thomas Sutton
1858: Athenaeum: Oct. 2, #1614, p. 434: photo taken
Fine-Art Gossip.
We have again to notice, with praise and pleasure, more numbers of Messrs. Maull & Polyblank’s photographic portraits of living celebrities.
[3 col.;
col. 2 starts w/: “review. Accurate, neat…”
col. 3 starts w/: “deep pouches under the eye…
1858: Athenaeum: Oct. 23, #1617, p. 526: Photo taken
Fine-Art Gossip:
Mr. Fox Talbot has achieved a surprising success…
1858: Athenaeum: Oct. 23, #1617, p. 526-527: Photo taken
Fine-Art Gossip:
We have to acknowledge several specimen photographs, the work of the ingenious and ambitious artist, Mr. Rejlander…..
1858: Athenaeum: Nov. 6, #1619, p. 589:
The Architectural Photographic Association has arranged to hold a Second Exhibition of Photographs at the Gallery of the Old Water-Colour Society in December. The splendid architectural collections of Macpherson, of Rome, and of Cimetta, Venice, will be, we hear, exhibited.
1858: Athenaeum: Nov. 6, #1619, p.591: photo taken
Societies:
Photographic. Nov. 2—R. Fenton, Esq., V.P., in the chair….
1858: Athenaeum: Nov. 20, #1621, p. 651: photo taken
Our Weekly Gossip:
Mr. George Downes, of the Photographic Institution [marine stereos]
[col. 2 starts w/; “Altogether these slides…”
1858: Athenaeum: Dec. 11, #1624, p. 773: photo taken
Ads:
The Photographic Art Annual for 1859
1858: Athenaeum: Dec. 25, #1626, p. 840-841: photos taken
Architectural Photographic Association.
The second annual Exhibition…
[4 cols.:
col. 2 starts w/: “bore so often to Cyprus
col. 3 starts w/: “at the god-youth Apollo…
col. 4 starts w.: “luster to fact, rendering imagination…”