The 19th century was a period of great innovation, as much in the field of art as anywhere else, the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park being one of the highpoints of the century, displaying the artistic and technological inventions of the time. Two concurrent exhibitions, Sculpture Victorious and Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 at Tate Britain in London illustrate different aspects of art and technical innovations in the fields of photography and sculpture.
The Victorian era was a golden age for sculpture in Britain. Under the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, more public sculpture was created than ever before, while inventions such as Cheverton’s Reducing Machine and Elkington’s electrolytic process used for James Westmacott ‘s 18 statues in the House of Lords of the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta enabled this to be done more economically and with a mass production that enabled reduced-size replicas of popular statues to be within the reach of every household, while at Coalbrookdale, cast iron was able to match the quality of bronze in John Bell’s Eagle Slayer exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851.
It was a century for showing off, as evidenced by the jewellery and silver on display but also in work made for the Great Exhibition where manufacturers competed to show their best to the world with, for example, Thomas Longmore and John Henk’s huge colourful elephant and Paul Comolera’s peacock, both produced in porcelain by Minton.
Photography was one of the life-changing inventions of this century, with salted paper prints invented by William Henry Fox Talbot being one of its earliest forms. The technique comprises dipping writing paper in a solution of salt, then partly drying it, coating it with silver nitrate and then drying it again before applying further coats of silver nitrate. An incredibly delicate process, it also enabled the photographers to alter the image to remove defects such as movement or cloudy skies.
Such prints were extremely fragile and relatively few have survived, hence this is the first exhibition devoted to this technique to be held in the UK. Organised in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography, it brings together some of the rarest and best early photographs of this type in the world, with images frozen in time, soft, still and calm, but often with incredible detail for such a technique. The photographs also provide a historic record of the period of archaeological sites,city views, landscapes, fishing communities and family parties.
Photographs copyright the Wilson Centre for Photography.
