Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
Talbot had few important sources of support in the early days of photography on paper, but among these the commanding scientific figure was Sir John Herschel. The name Herschel was known throughout the world, not only because of the family’s achievements in astronomy but also as a model of the modern scientific man. Separated by a generation, the critical one that bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Herschel and Talbot first met in Munich in 1824. It was Herschel who introduced Talbot to Sir David Brewster, and the two became fast if improbable friends. When Talbot was forced to hurriedly disclose his invention of photography in January 1839 after the announcement of daguerreotypy, Herschel was one of the first colleagues he contacted. Taking the newly laid railway out to Slough to see Herschel, Talbot discovered that the scientist had independently invented his own photographic process in less than a week! From that point on, Herschel’s immediate and far-ranging series of experiments set a pace that Talbot was only too happy to meet. Their correspondence during 1839 brims with excitement, creativity, and enthusiasm. Applying a concept he had first explored in 1819, Herschel used hypo (sodium thiosulfate) as a fixer in the photographic process, a critical advance. He was also concerned with regularizing the advance of photography, inventing not only the word “photography” but also the terms “positive” and “negative.” Herschel produced numerous paper negatives using variations of his own processes during 1839, and by that autumn he had even succeeded in making negatives on glass. Over the next few years he explored hundreds of different processes on paper, his 1842 cyanotype process proving the most influential. Herschel had little interest in actually producing images with the photographic processes he explored; his real quarry was an understanding of light. However, this did not reflect a rejection of either aesthetics or practical applications. Herschel had long been a master of the camera lucida (the instrument that had so frustrated Talbot that he was forced to invent photography). He preferred the analytical process of drawing to the extractive process of photography (but, indeed, it was also Herschel who coined the term “snap-shot” in 1860). He greatly influenced the photographers around him, including his brother-in-law, John Stewart (1814 – 1887), and especially Julia Margaret Cameron, who considered him “my first Teacher & to you I owe all the first experiences & insights” in the art. Acting on his philosophy of self-sacrifice and devotion to country, Herschel reluctantly accepted the position of master of the mint in 1851 and accomplished major and necessary reforms to Britain’s financial system, but at a cost to his health and scientific endeavors.