19th Century Printed Illustrations based on Photographs
 
Images selected by
Alan Griffiths
 
The purpose of this online exhibition is to provide an easily accessible collection of 19th century woodcuts, engravings and lithographs that were based upon photographs at a time when illustrations could not be printed directly from photographic positives or negatives in mass media or books.
 
Within this collection there are the well known images based on Daguerreotypes brought together by Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours for his publication Excursions daguerriennes: vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (1841-1842), and those of Timothy O'Sullivan at the "Shoshone Falls" and in the "Shifting Sand-Mounds" that were published in "Photographs from the High Rockies" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (June 1869). Besides these there are less well known images based on original photographs by Abraham Bogardus, J.E. Mayall, Mathew B. Brady, Louis Auguste Bisson, Richard Beard and others. There is also the remarkable case of the Daguerreotype of the hand of Captain Jonathan Walker with the brand SS (Slave Stealer) burnt into it and how it was used as a propaganda image against slavery in the American South.
 
The magazine illustration of "The American and French Fashions Contrasted" from The Water-Cure Journal (New York) of 1851 shows two illustrations side-by-side. The one on the right is the pre-photograph style of magazine illustration and the one on the left was based on a photograph. The difference is striking.
 
Added in the Signor Beato photograph of the Taku forts taken during the Second Opium War (1860) and how it was shown in the book by Robert Swinhoe Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 published the following year.