page_title: Francis Eginton
section_title: "Mechanical paintings" or "polygraphs"
hierarchical_section_title: Francis Eginton / "Mechanical paintings" or "polygraphs"
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Mr Egginton’s House in Soho, Birmingham. Unfortunately the house in this print can not be identified. Soho is an area of North West Birmingham, that until 1911 was part of the Handsworth District. Presumably the home of Francis Eginton (sometimes spelled "Egginton").
context_page_description: Francis Eginton, sometimes spelled Egginton, was an English glass painter. He painted windows for cathedrals, churches, chapels and stately homes, etc., around the country, leaving 50 large works altogether; his work was also exported abroad. His masterpiece is The Conversion of St. Paul, for the east window of St Paul's Church, Birmingham. He also developed a method for reproducing paintings mechanically.
context_section_description: Eginton was a partner with Boulton in the production of  "mechanical paintings" or "polygraphs" The idea for these was in all probability taken by Boulton from a process modified by Robert Laurie (1755?-1836) from Jean-Baptiste Le Prince's 'aquatint' engravings. Eginton perfected the method and applied it to the production of coloured copies of paintings. More plates than one were required for each picture, and after leaving the printing-press Eginton finished them by hand. They were copied  from the works of Philip James de Loutherbourg, Angelica Kauffman and other artists, and varied in price from £1. 10s. to £21. The largest were 40 inches by 50. They were sometimes mistaken for original paintings, although these old "polygraphs" were in fact nearly identical to the varnished coloured oleographs which later became prevalent, the main difference being that the latter were printed lithographically.
  F. P. Smith, then of the Patent Museum in South Kensington, maintained, in a paper read before the Photographic Society of London in 1863, that some of these polygraphs preserved at the museum were actually early photographs .  This claim, however was untenable. Pioneering photographer, Thomas Wedgwood, had indeed made experiments upon copying pictures by the action of light upon silver nitrate, but the results then obtained would not have been capable of producing pictures of their size and character. The matter was finally settled by a series of pamphlets written by Boulton's grandson, M. P. W. Boulton, in 1863-5, in which he gave an account of the whole matter. Furthermore, the leading lithographer Vincent Brooks was able to produce an exact imitation of the "ground" of one of the examples exhibited at South Kensington by taking an impression from an aquatint engraved plate on paper used for transfer lithography.
caption: View of Mr Egginton's House near Soho Birmingham (1775, artist unknown)
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