VIEW OF LITERATURE

DECEMBER 12, 1931

A Picture Book for Elders

DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL: Master of
Photography. By HEINRICH SCHWARZ.
New York: The Viking Press. 1931. $6.

Reviewed by PAUL STRAND

THIS handsome American edition of reproductions of the photographs of David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) is justified by its subject and does justice to it. It brings together eighty fine examples of Hill's portraits, printed in Germany from the German half-tone plates, which in these days of shoddy, commercialized reproductions are a joy to behold. Besides the illustrations there is a stimulating but uneven essay by Heinrich Schwarz, clearly translated by Helen E. Fraenkel.

Hill was the first great pioneer in the use of photography as a medium of expression and remains today one of the foremost photographers of all time. His work is not new to America but it was in danger of being lost and forgotten. Original Hill prints were shown by Alfred Stieglitz as early as 1906 in the gallery of the Photo Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue and again by Stieglitz with Max Weber in the big International Show of Photography at the Albright Gallery, Buffalo, in 1910. To Hill's work were devoted numbers 11-27 of Camera Work, but most of these books which recorded so completely and so beautifully the development of photography up to 1916 have been either lost or destroyed. It is important therefore to have this book from Germany and its American edition.

Herr Schwarz begins his essay with a scholarly account of the discovery of photography in France by Daguerre, the experiments of Niepce—also those of Fox Talbot in England, which latter led directly to photography as we know it today. Schwarz tries with considerable success to link this historical data with the social, scientific, and philosophical forces which created the early nineteenth century and lead directly to our own time. He then goes on to tell the interesting story of how Hill, a Scotch painter living in Edinburgh, was impelled in 1843 to take up the new and then miraculous process of photography. Although a landscape painter Hill had made up his mind to paint a large canvas of five hundred Scottish churchmen who were in revolt against the Anglican Church—a fight in which Hill himself had been deeply interested. And to aid him in this gigantic task, for which his technique as a painter was not adequate, he decided to make photographic likenesses. So began a series of experiments in which he was helped by his friend, a chemist, Robert Adamson. For several years they worked with indifferent success but from 1845 to 1848 a series of astounding portraits came out of this collaboration. In 1848 Adamson

died and so far as we know Hill did very little photographic work after that. Schwarz attributes this sudden stopping partly to Adamson's death and partly to a loss of interest on the part of people. My own feeling is that the familiar notion that photography is an inferior medium of expression came to the fore finally and Hill's friends gave him a bad conscience by telling him he was wasting his time and should get back to his painting.

As Herr Schwarz points out, although Hill started with the idea of using photography as a means to an end he actually was by vision and talent a photographer and became completely fascinated by the possibilities of this new, untried medium. For he photographed not only churchmen but most of the prominent people of his time in the literary, scientific, and art world of Scotland, all eager to come to him and sit for exposures of five or six minutes in the sun. In remarking upon the extraordinary unself-consciousness in these portraits, Herr Schwarz makes this interesting point—that these people were not concerned with any preconceived idea of a picture of themselves and so cooperated very completely and with a certain respect, in what was for them a mysterious and fascinating personal adventure. They had a certain inocence before the camera long ago lost by us.

Through the direct and austere arrangement of large masses of dark, broken by the head, the hands, or some part of the dress (built though it was upon the chiaroscuro of the old masters) Hill gives the eye at once an impression of simple grandeur and of true human nobility. He always emphasized the strength and never the weakness in his sitters, yet the portraits are unsentimental, free from any attempt to prettify. Possibly these men and women were not torn by inner conflict as most of us are today. For they appear sure of their direction in life to this extent—that they seem to have known what life meant to them and what was truly of value to them in it. This kind of inner strength Hill saw and recorded. And it has its esthetic counterpart in the solidity of his esthetic structure, in the indestructible dignity of his arrangements of light and dark—so simple in effect, so difficult to achieve.

It is true that for many years no photographs were made which had the spiritual depth and unity of Hill's. Both Julia Cameron and Nadar, whom Schwarz mentions, are important in the development of photography, but their portraits do not come out of a vision as deep or as clear as do those of Hill. Yet this does not justify Herr Schwarz in saying "Hill's calotypes are examples of photography

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

so brilliant that by the side of them everything which has taken place since pales." Judging from the sensitiveness with which he has approached Hill's photographs one feels that were he not completely ignorant of what has been done by others he could not have made such a ridiculous assertion, one which greatly weakens his affirmation of photography itself.

There are, for instance, the recently discovered photographs of the Frenchman Atget, a man much more naïve than Hill, yet whose work is just as pure, just as direct, whose pictures of the shops, buildings, and markets of Paris are informed with the same nobility of spirit. More important still there is another large body of work which Herr Schwarz could not have seen except in America, for Europe knows absolutely nothing about it—the later work of Alfred Stieglitz. This photography goes far beyond either Hill or Atget—comes out of a more conscious and profound vision, a greater mastery of the medium. The world which is reflected in Stieglitz's photographs is a universe, intensely alive with the awareness of multiple forces. To embody this universe he has used every instrument possible to photography, not only chiaroscuro but the expressiveness of pure photographic line, texture, and tonality—undreamed of by Hill, only partly sensed by Atget.

The work of all these men, each so different, yet so alive, is definitive of what photography can be when, and only when—untampered with—its technique becomes the tool of vision, of spirit. Their photographs explode the still current but fallacious notion, to which even Schwarz subscribes, that in comparison with painting, photography is a limited and inferior medium, incapable of reflecting any profound human seeing. For they demonstrate that what is still attributed exclusively to the imagination of the painter actually exists in the objective world, that if it is seen it can be photographed. Further, that painting is not a substitute for photography or vice versa; each is a distinct and separate way of perceiving and of recording meanings and relationships in life. Goethe's words quoted by Schwarz are true ones in this relation. "What else have art and artists ever done except perceive the individual thing, isolate the object out of the welter of phenomena, elevate it, intensify it, inspire it, and give it meaning?" In short, the root of art, regardless of medium, is seeing.

the satirist

Autobahn 1/2/42

On the second floor one is confronted with the astonishing photographs by D. O. Hill and R. Adamson, 1843-48. Hill, introduced to America in 1905, had his work first published in "Camera Work 1911," the periodical of the American macenas Alfred Stieglitz.

Even the fact that most of this models were artists, authors and scientists (supposed to have outstanding features), the noble beauty of these portraits, especially the double portrait of J. Henning and A. R. Ritchie, strikes one immediately as something belonging to those old times. The lack of sharpness (our contemporary cameras work many thousand times more subtly and the fibrous structure of the paper used, turned out to be not only no drawback but an advantage, if one keeps the artistic effect in mind).

Standing before these photographic masterworks one is tempted to add this pseudo-art, this bastard, engendered by mother Tastefulness and father Technical Skill, to the genuine arts. But the lens of the camera knows of no hesitation, exaggeration, uncertainty or exaltation; the eye of the artist does know them fairly well. The more accomplished the camera, the farther removed from a real work of art the photographs become. Hill's models, who had to sit still for five minutes, were unsteady, the lens was crude, the paper was fibrous; this all helped to bring about a certain beauty, a beauty not to be mistaken for the far more complicated and mysteriously thriving beauty of a genuine work of art.

"Good Pictures"
bring you
to him

1st. Lieut. Bernard Shaw, 28
year old son of Mrs. Veta
Shaw, who is serving with the
U. S. Army in the South Pacific.

Mrs. Veta Shaw, who kindly allows us to publish her son's letter, is helping him by working on the production front in our Optical Division.

Dear Mom and Mary:

Civilization has long been a dream to us, and when
we look at a magazine or pictures from the good old
U. S. A. it is like looking at Mars or some far-off,
mythical place where all good soldiers go.

I'm not quite up on the local situation, I want to hear
about Ann Arbor, Detroit, how people act, think, and
what is going on. People at home have no idea how
it is not to see a building, a church, a pretty girl for
seven long months.

We are not ungrateful, it's just that we always
want our World held up before us—it makes it easier
to go on.

Love to all,
Bernard

Get the best out of your present
camera, take care of it and get
"Good Pictures." Pictorial records
of your daily life will be of great
interest to your men abroad. Send
them pictures of the things they
are fighting for. Here at Argus
we are building steadily 100%
War Production for Victory and
preparing for that time, when our
new cameras will replace those
that are giving such good service
today.

AWARDED TO PLANT 2
OPTICAL DIVISION

Good Pictures

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conserve your film—make each picture a "good
picture." Send 25c today for this 56 page book.

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The Last Word

Camera Gun (For Professionals Only)

Sir:

I would appreciate receiving Capt. Prentice
G. Morgan's address. He wrote the article
"Camera for Reconnaissance" in your August
issue of MINICAM PHOTOGRAPHY.

I am interested in the construction and de-
tails of his camera "gun," which, to my knowl-
edge, is not covered in any army publication.

Thank you for this information.

H. B. CHILSON,

First Lt., U. S. Army.

12th Armored Division,
Camp Campbell, Ky.

* Write to Capt. Prentice G. Morgan, Hq.
IV Arm'd Corps, APO 354, Camp Young, Cali-
fornia.

The Grand Old Man

Sir:

I am sure that your magazine will prosper.
There is a very live note running through it.
And that is what I demand above all things
from anything I come in contact with. Alive-
ness and a goodly dose of truthfulness, without
a trace of sanctimoniousness in it. A life-giving
smile—God's, not the Devil's grin. I don't
know where to place the usual American Smile.
I leave that to you. Maybe MINICAM can place
it. If it can, please have it photographed and
send me a print.

ALFRED STEIGLITZ,
New York City.

* To any reader who can interpret the American smile in such a way as to please Alfred Steiglitz, we offer 1st $50, 2nd $25, 3rd $10. Send photos to us before November 15. If you want pic returned, enclose stamps.—ED.

Sir:

The keyhole through which this mug shows
is an old pal. Recognize him? It's Walter
Winchell.

SGT. PAUL DORSEY,
U. S. Navy Hosp., Ward 47A,
Oakland, Calif.

GREAT MOMENTS in the
Lives of "Modern" Photographers

2. In the Air Force you're "on the beam" when you're headed in the right direction. LAWRENCE A. ONISH (right) and WALTER A. WEYR (below), both recent graduates of the School, are both very much "on the beam" as photographer-instructor and photographer, respectively, in Uncle Sam's Air Force, 94%, of all School graduates in the armed forces are serving as photographers and photography instructors. Hold ranks up to Major. An intensified course especially for young men approaching draft status may be started at any time.

3. No obstacle to ARTHUR AVEDON was his modest tuition fee while attending the SCHOOL OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY. Aby coached by those two virtuosi of portraiture, John Hutchins and Helene Sanders of the School's faculty, student Avedon was soon earning sufficient from free lance assignments to more than pay his way. He's moved along fast since graduation, is today chief photographer for Delar Stydios, Radio City's top-flight portrait photographers.

4. Information Please! "What about tuition fees?" The answer is genuinely surprising, for specialized courses or complete study programs, either day or evening, are exceptionally moderate. Visit the School, or write for outline of courses as necessary. Address H. P. Sidel, director, Dept. M9.

THE SCHOOL OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

136 East 57th St.,

New York City

[7]

Family Album - 1943

## Me and My Sunday-Monday-Tuesday Best

If I can't wield a weapon, I can at least weld one. And until the war is over, these overalls will be my favorite year 'round costume.

Awarded the Army-Navy
"E" for High Achievement

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CANADIAN DISTRIBUTOR:

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MINICAM PHOTOGRAPHY

22 East 12th Street
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Enter my two-year subscription for which
I enclose $4.00.

Add 50c extra for Canada.

Name

Address

City State

## Sorry, Our Error

Sir:

In your description of the parachuting Magazine's sensations on page 66 of your July issue you say: "The blood rushes to his head as he plunges downward." Not as long as he is falling free, before the parachute opens. What will you bet?

D. M. DECKER,

1300 Harrison St.,
Wilmington, Del.

Sir:

Mr. Decker, the reader who calls your attention to the cutline on page 66 of your July issue, is entirely correct and the magazine is wrong when it states that "the blood rushes to his head as he plunges downward."

F. A. PETRIE,
Lieutenant, USNR,
Public Relations Officer.

U. S. Naval Air Station,
Lakehurst, N. J.

## No, Sir, Friend—We Were Right First Time

Sir:

In the August issue of the MINICAM I believe there was a misstatement. In "The Last Word" Celia Joan Allen wrote inquiring what depth of focus was. You gave her the definition for depth of field. That is a common mistake but not one you should make.

We enjoy your magazine.

PFC. PRESTON L. CUNNINGHAM.
7th Photo Sqdn. (L),
Peterson Army Air Field,
Colorado Springs, Colo.

* For practical purposes, the terms "depth of field" and "depth of focus" usually are considered synonymous. They indicate the property possessed by a photographic lens of producing in one image or picture a sharp delineation of objects situated at different distances from the lens.

This property is inherent to a greater or less degree in all lenses: practically speaking, it is controlled by the focal length of the lens, its relative aperture, the distance of the lens from the groundglass or film, the diameter of the permissible circle of confusion, and the presence of aberrations or optical errors in the lens.

Strictly speaking, depth of field (also called "depth of definition") refers to the distance between the nearest and the farthest sharp object in the photograph, whereas depth of focus is that distance within which the focusing screen or photographic film may be moved while the object to be photographed remains stationary, and without the object suffering any material loss of sharpness during this movement.

In optical parlance, depth of focus represents the limits within which the film or screen can be moved without exceeding the circle of confusion or absolute focus of the pencils of light forming the image. The circle of confusion commonly is represented as a disk, the diameter of which is popularly assumed to be 1/200th of an inch.

OK, Pfc. Preston—now that you got in on the line, what are you going to do with it? We suggest this: If anybody asks you what depth of field, or depth of focus, or depth of definition means, you tell them: "THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THE NEAREST AND THE FARTHEST OBJECTS WHICH ARE SHARPLY REPRODUCED." If they squawk let them read the above, which is exact, dull, and preposterous to remember.—ED.

[8]

By ARON M. MATHIEU.... HILL PORTRAITS FROM "CAMERA WORK"

**DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL** made the photographs shown on these pages with the "Talbotype process" (described in *MINICAM* for July) in 1843-47. Talbot's two great basic discoveries were improved upon by Robert Adamson, Hill's assistant who also took the above photograph of Hill. These pictures were made from Hill's original paper negatives by Craig Annan, whose father, T. Annan, was his friend and countryman.

This is the second of a series of articles acquainting readers with their photographic cultural heritage. The first article, in July, dealt with William Henry Fox Talbot. The third article, forthcoming in either October or November issue is about Scott Archer, prepared by A. E. Marshall.

**P**HOTOGRAPHY was only four years old when its first great practitioner, David Octavius Hill, began to produce calotypes which still are regarded as the best the world knows in portraiture. By studying his methods and his prints, we may fix in our minds the first principles of photography. As these principles become a natural part of our being and we use them correctly without thinking, and equally spontaneously reject the inartistic approach, we leave our days of amateurism behind and become a little less uncertain that our negative will show what the camera saw.

These first principles, singularly enough, deal with neither tools nor technique. Shakespeare got along nicely without a typewriter, sticking to the quill and foolscap. Hill, photographically speaking, had little better. A dollar Brownie with some pan film is a century better than anything Hill ever had; and a Contax with a F:1.5 lens, coupled range finder, built-in light meter 1/1250 of a second speed could have confused him just as much as it does so many of us today.

He had no artificial lights, filters, or calibrated charts, and his pictures were born where every picture should be born —in the mind and the heart of the man who takes it.

**FASHIONS AND FADS** in photography will come and go, but we feel convinced that Hill's work, made over a hundred years ago, in the days when photography was a laborious feat, establishes a standard of taste and style.

[22]

Hill's studio was really outdoors and his light came both from the sun overhead and also as it was cast up into the subject's face by a large concave mirror. Some qualities, inherent in hundreds of Hill's prints, are not necessarily qualities of artistic selection, but rather qualities forced on the photographer as the only means of mastering his problems. Most of his sitters were taken with slightly downcast eyes,—usually turned away from the photographer, because they sat out in the sun. To look straight ahead would make them squint, while the long 60 second exposure would blur the eye if the lids winked, or the eye moved. Hill, taking the easy way out, instructed most of his sitters to look down. The end result isn't necessarily a preferred one but certainly it turns out better than the hundred million odd snap shots taken annually of Aunt Betty on the front porch with her eyes all screwed up and her cheeks puffed into pouches because "the sun was in her eyes when the picture was taken."

So here, at the very start we run into a "first principle." Simply that there is no "must" which compels you, when taking the picture of a friend, to show each and every scar and blemish, character line and unshaven whisker. The prime quality of your photograph is not whether you instantly recognize the subject and his degree of fastidiousness the moment the picture was taken. Rather, the prime quality is whether or not the photograph as a whole is pleasing to the human eye which so delightedly responds to the balance and beauty of line.

Hill solved this matter, as he solved many others, in the simplest way; not perhaps the best, nor the most original, but certainly the simplest. Originally an artist, a not too successful one, Hill's study of art has brought him under the influence of the respected painters of his day, Raeburn, Ingres, Gainsborough, and Lawrence.

He loved the work of these men, and respected their artistic judgment as they transferred it to canvas. Thus, as a

common denominator in many of Hill's photographs we see a likeness in composition, in arrangement, to the paintings of Raeburn, as for instance in his "Lord Eldin," or "Dr. Adam."

Unquestionably, the physical quality that gave Hill's portraits their special quality of composition was his own acquaintance with the cultural artistic heritage of his day. For us to copy this quality would be fraudulent, for we live in another day. Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Seurat, Manet, Monet,—the whole gamut of the French revolution in art is in our very blood. Whether or not we have seen a Renoir we have been influenced, unconsciously in our artistic thinking by billboard art, car card posters such as the Wrigley series, which in hand-me-down style have shoved at us all the artistic heritage of our day. Even the buttons on women's dresses, as compared to the style of Hill's day, show the influence of the fact that men like Picasso have lived. To copy the composition of a Hill portrait, so as to improve our own, is meritorious if we do it as an end result. But to copy Hill, as slavishly as possible, and make a few portraits after his style, is fun and interesting to do. The editors of *MINICAM*, for instance, did it just to hell around. I think we learn a little that way, but the essence that Hill's composition teaches us is to go right straight back to art leaders of this, our very own day, and look to them, not necessarily to Ingres and Raeburn, for inspiration in composition.

It is right here, where we do part company with many of our betters. They suggest, that the photographer go merely inside himself to discover the compositional form of his portraits. That's OK if you are "one in a million." But who of us is that one? We want to sing—we haven't the voice—we want to dance—we haven't the grace. For us who love photography as a hobby, who give it our spare time when we can, there is a comfortable, if not too original road. Like Hill, we may acquaint ourselves with the compositional forms of our day, and utilize eclectically

[24]

these newer, more modern forms. While
it won't give us a great portrait, it surely
will make Aunt Betty look one heck of a
lot better as she stands there on the front
porch.

In addition to composition, patterned
after the art of his day, and the honest
presumption of making his poses quite
frankly suit the photographic material
with which he worked, Hill established
between himself and his subject a mood
which is the quintessence of his art. This
establishing of a mood, between the pho-
tographer and his human subject is with-
in the realm of us all. Elsewhere in this
issue, in a sort of a bastard way, Marga-
ret Hawkins tells how she did it with a
neighbor girl.

Exercises to teach us how to establish
this mood, either by creating it in our-
selves and endowing it to the sitter by
force of personality; or by locating a
very special charm in the sitter and
capitalizing on it, are useful things to

practise.

Hill himself may have tried the same,
some afternoon, with a local fishwife. But
in the portraits he left us, we see this fish-
wife not as a lovely piece of composition
alone, but also as a fishwife of a particu-
lar village of Scotland, at a very special
time in the day and year of Our Lord.
And is that not the singular contribution
of William Henry Fox Talbot's pencil
of nature?

A technique Hill frequently used, per-
haps to put the subject at ease, and also to
help suggest the spirit and make-up of the
subject to the viewer, was simply that of
placing in the subjects hands some object
connected with his trade or profession.

Studying Hill's pictures themselves is
perhaps the best way to learn what the
man has to offer us today.

Students of photograph's history may
prefer some facts about Hill's life. He was
born in 1802 at Perth, Scotland, and edu-
cated in Edinburgh where he spent almost

**BECOMING** more interested
in Hill, after studying his
life and work, the editors of
MINICAM tried to make a
picture after the manner of
"D. O." The model read a
passage from the book she
holds, and then looked up,
to interpret it. Taken out of
doors with a concave mirror
for extra lighting, to the
model's left. (A small mirror
won't do, as it causes spots.)
The model, Ida Masini, is
our editorial secretary. The
photograph was made by
Audrey Goldsmith of MINI-
CAM's staff, "after the man-
ner of 'D. O.' and just for
the hell of it."

[26]

all his life. His father was a bookseller, and gave the boy a good education under Andrew Wilson, superintendent of the School of Art at Edinburgh. "D. O.," as he was called by his friends, turned to landscape painting, and one day, fortuitous circumstances, knocked the door down. In 1843 he received a commission to paint a group portrait of nearly 500 clergymen and laymen who in violent protest gathered in Edinburgh to found the Free Church of Scotland. Hill turned to photography to record the faces of these clergymen, so that he could then paint them at his leisure, enlisting the aid of Robert Adamson, a young chemist to help in developing and printing. The finished canvas with 470 faces is titled "The Signing of the Deed of Demission and Act of Separation" and as a work of art it is the inartistic monster you might expect. For it, however, Hill received 1,500 pounds plus the right to sell auto-type copies of his own. The original painting measures 11 feet and 4 inches by 5 feet.

Hill's camera was a simple wooden box. The (English) *Photographic Journal* has said: "we would not give candy for his lens." The shutter was opened and closed by a lever. Exposures were in full sunlight from 30 seconds to one minute. The lens was a short focus achromatic. For negatives, Hill used what Talbot invented, as described in *MINICAM* for July, '43. However, he soaked his paper in wax so the light passed through them easier. His positives were printed on silver chloride paper and fixed with hypo-sulphite of soda.

All of Hill's portraits seem to have a natural look, as if he had slipped up and caught the subject at work in a pensive moment. For instance, James Nasmyth, an engineer, was sitting holding a divider and a book, perhaps figuring out a mathematical problem; while Alexander Handy-side Ritchie, a sculptor, holds a modeling tool, leaning back as though studying, before putting on the finishing touches. Hill's subjects, being mostly notables, had expressive faces filled with character. Today

photographers will often strive to record a face with definition that would delight an optician, and forget a man's character and his life's work.

Hill concentrated most of his attention on the head and the hands of his subjects as conveyors of spiritual meanings. Sometimes he singled out small details of dress and ornament to increase the opulent effect of a particular picture or to emphasize, as Alan Graeme said, "the total physical unity of the subject."

The outstanding authority on David O. Hill is Dr. Heinrich Schwarz, formerly of Vienna, and now with the Museum of Art at Providence. Dr. Schwarz feels that a substantial part of the success of Hill is due to the work of his chemist friend, Robert Adamson, at whose death Hill gave up photography and returned to painting. Hill died in 1870, a fact unrecorded in the photographic journals of his day.

The value in studying Hill, for the amateur, and perhaps the professional too, is to gain the very right thought that success in photography is related so little, so very little, to materials.

Then we learn to do justice to the subject by recognizing his attitude, his own vibrant force which is his very unique and personal reflection of life. To portray that is the aim. To do it as Hill did, after the compositional artistic manner of portrait painters of his day, is one way.

### AVAILABLE REFERENCE SOURCES:

*   Schwarz, H.: David Octavius Hill, der Meister der Photographie, Leipzig, 1931.

*   Schwarz, H.: English translation of the above. Viking Press, 1931.

*   *London Art Journal: (New Series)* Vol. viii 1869.

*   *Camera Work:* 1905, No. 2; 1909, No. 28; 1912, No. 37.

*   *British Journal of Photography,* 1903, page 282.

*   *Goldschmidt (London)* An album of 150 Hill calotypes.

*   *Museum of Fine Arts, Buffalo, N. Y.* Voluminous Hill reference material.

*   *Photography: A Short Critical History:* Beaumont Newhall, Museum of Modern Art, N. Y.

*   *Photographic Journal of America* "D. O. Hill and his work" by F. C. Inglis.

*   *Journal of Edinburgh (Scot.)* Phot. Soc. 1909.

*   *Catelouge of the Epstean Collection on History and Science of Photography,* Columbia University, 1937.

[28]

SPECIAL
EFFECTS

HOW TO PUT THEM
IN YOUR PICTURES

Would you like to see materials that permit special effects, such as paper, toners, film, etc. treated as Gus Wolfman (of E. Leitz) explains filters in this article? Write the editor of Minicam Photography, 22 East 12th St., Cincinnati, Ohio. We welcome your suggestions.

A CURIOUS paradox is ever present in photography: while scientists create methods bringing the perfect negative a little closer, the photographer reaches for a technique that preserves the personal factor. Using a filter is one of the many ways of bringing distinction to your photographs, and of placing an emphasis where you desire it.

*What is a filter and what will it do?*

RED

GREEN

BLUE-
VIOLET

The answer is simple: It is a piece of colored glass, or colored gelatin cemented between two pieces of glass. The filter is usually round and may be permanently fitted into a mount which slips over the front of the lens; or the filter can be supplied without a mount for use with special interchangeable mounts.

Most of us have used filters. We know that they are necessary to prevent us from getting blank skies when photographing landscapes. Let's investigate the basic facts behind the filter:

1. The main reason for using the filter is that films and the eye do not "see" colors the same way. Films are oversensitive to blue; so much so, that blue photographs practically white. A blue sky may appear blank white, without tone, in a print. Some films are too

RED FILTER

GREEN FILTER

BLUE-VIOLET
FILTER

YELLOW FILTER

THE "LITTLE MEN" above represent the three primary colors of light—red, green and blue-violet. As seen by the actions of the men the red filter holds back green and blue-violet and allows red to pass through; the green filter retards red and blue-violet, and permits free passage to green; the blue-violet filter allows its own color to pass through, acting as a barrier to other colors; while a yellow filter holds back blue-violet and permits red and green to pass through. The latter is because yellow light actually is composed of a mixture of red and green light.

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# Autumn Millet

by ALAN PRIEST, *Curator of Far Eastern Art*

The Kano family gave its name to a school of Japanese painting that for almost two centuries was the largest and most influential of all the schools. Through successive generations and under the sponsorship of the prevailing feudal lords, painters who inherited this name by birth or adoption held a commanding position in Japanese art. Assimilating the strong Chinese influences that carried over from the works of such noted earlier painters as the great Sesshu, and the peculiarly native qualities of the aristocratic Tosa school, the Kanos developed what has been termed the most brilliant school of secular art in the world.

The traditional founder of the Kano school is Masanobu (1434-1530), chief court painter for the shogun of his day. He, like Sesshu, admired the Chinese painting of the Sung dynasty, especially the poetic landscapes done in monochrome. The most important of Masanobu's sons, Motonobu (1476-1559), married a daughter of Tosa Mitsunobu (about 1430-about 1521), the Emperor's chief court painter of the day. The families married and so in their way did the two schools of painting. The aristocratic subject matter, the gold and the color of the Tosa school became part of the Kano style. Thus neatly does Ernest Fenollosa, in *Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art*, explain the beginning of Kano painting.

After the death of Motonobu in 1559 his second son, Kano Shoyei (1519-1592), became the head of the Kano painters and was employed by the great military commander Nobunaga (1534-1582), who made the city of Kyoto his headquarters in 1568 and began the great walled and moated castle still known as Nijo castle.

The Kano school as we usually think of it was a school of gorgeous palace and temple painting. The most prominent artist of this brilliant phase was Kano Eitoku (1543-1590), who was Hideyoshi's chief court painter and rose to fame with

him. Of all the shoguns of Japan, Hideyoshi, who came to power in 1582, was the most spectacular. He was not of one of the great families but fought his way up to the shogunate from stable boy. In matters of temperament and taste he has been likened to Napoleon. Certainly he surrounded himself with a blaze of splendor, which gave opportunity to Eitoku and his adopted son Sanraku (1559-1635) to decorate on a very grand scale, an opportunity which they and their descendants took. In Kyoto alone, Nijo castle with its seemingly endless suites of state ceremonial rooms (there was and is a second more livable palace enclosed within a second moat) and many temples still exist as proof to the historian, as a cherished National Treasure, and as a constant pleasure to visitors whether Japanese or not Japanese.

We get only the smallest idea of all this from a pair of screens or sliding doors, which is the most we can see of the style in Western museums. From these we must imagine suites of rooms with as many as twenty or more screens or panels in each room. In Nijo castle these rooms are two stories high with screens, sometimes arranged in two tiers, on a much larger scale than those with which we are familiar. The state reception rooms of Nijo castle follow one upon the other, all

## Contents

DECEMBER 1958

Autumn Millet 101
*By Alan Priest*

The Emperor's Cabinet 108
*By Clare Eames*

The First Victorian Photographer 113
*By A. Hyatt Mayor*

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Quail feeding in an autumn field

with gold backgrounds emphasizing particular themes—huge stark pine trees, bamboos, willows, paeonies (surely one prefers the spelling pæony to peony for these noble flowers), egrets, pheasants and lesser birds, tigers (and surely if one speaks of a pride of lions one should speak of an ecstasy of tigers). So it goes on.

The Imperial Household guide as he leads from room to room says merely that they are by the "Kano painter" and does not like it if some pert tourist asks "Which Kano?" My sympathies are with the guide. In these accredited palace and temple works the Kanos are more difficult to distinguish than the Giotteschi, and it is obvious that a great many competent studio workers helped carry out the master painter's design. While it is true that the Kano painters worked also in monochrome and many individually painted in the tradition of Sesshu and China, we think of them, and rightly, as the great Japanese school of public decorative painting.

Aside from palace and temple works the Kano

painters supplied screens and paintings for the households of the rich—many, as we can see as examples emerge from private collections. The Museum has lately acquired two small screens attributed to and bearing the seals of Kano Sanraku, the adopted son of and successor to Eitoku. The subject of these screens is autumn millet.

These screens were not painted as part of a palace or temple decoration. Until they came to the Metropolitan they had always been in private collections. Even in modern times many Japanese do not care for publicity and its many dangers. The screens do appear in that magazine of art, the *Kokka*, which in itself was an innovation; when it was issued in 1889 it was the first magazine of art to be published in the Orient. They appear in the *Kokka* of October 1893 with a murky illustration and a laudatory note. Then they were the property of Baron Kuki; now, fortunately, they are ours.

They are small in size and are in a very different mood from the typical palace and temple paintings of their day. It is almost as if the painter had said to himself, "I am tired of being grand. I will do a little thing to please myself for once." There is, however, one room in the Tenkyu-in, which is one of the complex of temples known as Myoshinji, which is painted in much the same mood. The room in the Tenkyu-in is often referred to by Western visitors as the Morning Glory room. It is one of a series of rooms attributed to Sanraku. The other rooms are painted with pine trees, bamboos, and tigers in the grand manner. The Morning Glory room is painted lightly. When you come on it after a day of tigers and pine trees you come upon a presentation of early morning in which the chief thing is sky-blue morning glories. To be sure, the morning glories are supplemented with a few other garden flowers, with birds and bits of fence.

And in mood the Metropolitan screens are like it. The one speaks of early morning, the other of late afternoon. Both speak of a perfect moment of the day and both speak of little things. Both speak of the country and small farms as against the splendor of state gardens. Both the Morning Glory room and the Metropolitan screens are attributed to the same painter. They are in the same mood. A contemporary

*The Metropolitan Museum of Art* BULLETIN

VOLUME XVII, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 1958

Published monthly from October to June and quarterly from July to September. Copyright 1958 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, New York 28, N. Y. Re-entered as second-class matter November 17, 1942, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of August 24, 1912. Subscriptions $5.00 a year. Single copies fifty cents. Sent free to Museum Members. Four weeks' notice required for change of address. Editor: Marshall B. Davidson.

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Robert Paul. Photographed by David Octavius Hill. Dick Fund

by A. HYATT MAYOR, Curator of Prints

Photography, like many inventions that matter, was discovered independently by different men in different places, for when an aspiration stirs an age many men will always work, separate and alone, to make it come true. So in 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot announced the elements of the negative-positive process in London, and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre described the practically perfected daguerreotype in Paris six months later. Though the daguerreotype won the immediate day with its relative speed of exposure and the sharpness of its detail, the future of photography lay with the still imperfect, slower, fuzzy negative-positive process because it makes many identical images instead of the daguerreotype's one. Landscape occupied the daguerreotype during its first year or two, after which the invention of a "quickener" made portraiture its main business during the quarter century of its existence. For the first four years the negative-positive process was thought too slow for portraiture, until, by a singular chain of

circumstances, it produced some of the finest portraits ever made with a camera at any time. The handsomeness of this first group of artistic photographs justified the inventor's boldness in calling his paper-negative process the calotype, from *Kalos*, the Greek for beautiful.

The circumstances which led to the creation of the first memorable photographs were these. During the 1830s many adherents of the Scottish Presbyterian Church began to feel that each congregation should have the right to choose its own ministers instead of being forced to accept those presented arbitrarily by the central authority of the church. The controversy came to a head in the winter of 1842-1843 when the law courts decided against the democratic plea. At a convocation held in Edinburgh on May 18, 1843, the Non-Intrusionist ministers resigned their livings, their manses, their privileges, and their security in order to found the Free Church of Scotland. Their sacrifice prevailed, for a few years later the autocratic faction yielded by

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New Haven Fisherman. Dick Fund
Findlay the Deerstalker. Dick Fund

ceasing to present ministers to the congregations. In 1890 the new Free Church finally joined the United Presbyterian Church to form the United Free Church.

At that May meeting in 1843 the Disruption of the Church of Scotland shook everybody who had crowded into the hall, and it especially moved one particular witness, a landscape painter named David Octavius Hill. Hill sympathized so passionately with the Non-Intrusionists that he resolved to immortalize them—all 474 of them—in a picture of their great scene of renunciation. But how was he, who had painted landscapes for some twenty years, now suddenly to attempt so many portraits? It was natural that he should think of photography, since the four-year-old discovery was the talk of all the civilized world. Within four months after the Disruption, or possibly earlier, Hill was at work photographing the ministers of the new Free Church.

Once he had started, Hill's photographs made such a stir that all Edinburgh was climbing up the steps of Calton Hill to his studio to sit for him. What had begun as notes for a painting is now the only work that keeps his memory alive. Yet he did not let his success as a photographer deter him from his original purpose, for after taking his famous photographs in four and a half summers, he labored on his huge, now forgotten canvas for nearly twenty years thereafter.

He posed his sitters among furniture and curtsains outside his house to get the full sun. The photography therefore must have been restricted to warm bright days, which, in Edinburgh, would eliminate much of the year. The negatives of wove paper, soaked in nitrate of silver and sensitized with iodide of potassium, required three to five minutes for exposure. This allowed his sitters the leisure to settle through shifts of expression into their look of basic character. The thick paper of the negatives blurred distracting detail into broad light and shade. Hill turned these technical imperfections into artistic advantages, but they do not in themselves account for his success, for other members of the local photographic society, the Calotype Club, used the same paper and chemicals to photograph the same scenes and people—they might have borrowed Hill's camera, who knows?—but their

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The Walter Scott Memorial, Edinburgh. Dick Fund

results are as commonplace as a boy's backyard snapshots.

Hill has been imitated by subsequent photographers because he knew exactly what effect he wanted. When posing his men he certainly thought of Raeburn's solid, simple lights and darks and the sober expressive pattern of head and hands. He posed some of his women, or else grouped figures around a table or a guitar, as though he were a Terborch or a de Hooch with a camera. His landscapes show much less influence of the historic styles. They are also fewer than his portraits, but he must have thought them important, for in 1846 he published twenty-two as *A Series of Calotype Views of St. Andrews*. This was also a tribute to Robert Adamson, his partner in photography, who came from St. Andrews. To make views Hill, like the early

daguerreotypists, traveled with his bulky equipment as far afield as Linlithgow and York, but he seems to have made all his portraits at home or near by.

Part of Hill's success came from the picturesque ruggedness of his sitters who were upholding Edinburgh as a recent intellectual center. Burns had died in 1796, Raeburn in 1823, and Walter Scott in 1832, and *Blackwood's Magazine*, founded in 1817, was then coloring much of the thought of the English-speaking world. Edinburgh, like Boston, felt an Attic surge of alertness, a sudden Greek self-confidence, which both cities expressed by building porticoes of Doric columns like those that had been popularized through Stuart and Revett's *Antiquities of Athens*. Most of Hill's sitters had known Edinburgh's great generation, and their faces express the

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fullness of personalities developing in an age of
self-reliance.

Hill's artistic vision created the beauty of these photographs, but for the technical manipulations he had to rely on Robert Adamson, a brilliant chemist, who was twenty-two (and Hill forty-one) when they started to collaborate in 1843. At Adamson's early death in January 1848 the photography stopped. They had worked together as feverishly as though they had known that time was running out, for in four or five summers they created well over a thousand negatives and established photography as one of the arts.

By 1858, or possibly earlier, Hill had returned to using the camera by posing sitters for a professional photographer called A. Macglashton, who used the wet-plate process, known since 1852. In 1862 fifteen of these rare later photographs appeared under the grand title of *Contributions towards the Further Development of the Fine Art in Photography*. Hill had modernized, but not improved, his style by making each photograph look like a painting by Frith or an English book illustration of the sixties, and by giving it a poetic title like a Victorian picture. The publication fell so flat that it has all but disappeared today and is not mentioned in any account of Hill's life.

Hill's early calotypes continued to interest people for a while. The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1862 awarded an honorable mention to "Hill and Adams" for "talbotype goods." After

that bungling approval these photographs seem to have dropped from sight until the 1890s when a young Scottish photographer, J. Craig Annan, began to send Hill's portraits to the leading painters of the day for their criticism. Whistler found them "curiously attractive" and Sargent, more generous, called them "simply magnificent." Annan, who introduced photogravure from Germany to Scotland, printed the original paper negatives directly onto photogravure plates with the best results ever obtained from Hill's work. When Alfred Stieglitz published these photogravures in *Camera Work* in 1905 and 1912, Hill's art suddenly revealed a way for pictorialist camera portraiture, and has affected photography ever since. The world at large became aware of him in 1931, when Heinrich Schwarz's excellent monograph on him appeared in German and English. Professor Schwarz is about to reissue his book in amplified form.

The Museum owns several hundred Hill photographs, which were either given by Alfred Stieglitz or else were bought out of the Dick Fund and the David H. McAlpin Fund. These photographs re-create an early Victorian drawing room where solid men dismiss subjects that they know to be facts, and ladies create conversation with a charm elaborated in leisure. How lucky it is that these cultivated people, matured by one of history's few happy moments, should have been the first large group of human beings whom we know with the completeness of detail that is attainable only through the camera.

Mons Meg Cannon on the Castle, Edinburgh. Dick Fund

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*Notes* It has often been remarked that Amer-
ican museums, unlike so many of their sister
institutions abroad, tend to be active cultural
centers in their communities rather than mere
repositories of cherished collections. This broader
and more assertive role evolved so naturally out
of American experience that we take it for
granted, as we do the services of our free public
libraries. Viewed in wider historical perspective,
however, it is a distinctively American phe-
nomenon and a relatively recent development.

To play this public role effectively in a com-
munity as large and complex and demanding as
New York City calls for a stupendous amount of
activity. The *Calendar of Events*, which is sent
periodically to Members and friends of this Mu-
seum, lists the impressive variety of programs
offered in our galleries, classrooms, and audi-
toriums day by day throughout the year. At every
level and in all directions a constant effort is
being made to enlarge the usefulness of our col-
lections and to relate them meaningfully to
contemporary experience. Through our lending
collections and publications, by radio and tele-
vision, this effort reaches far beyond the confines
of the Museum building.

Copious as are the listings in the *Calendar*, the
events noted are only an extension of other basic
operations of the Museum. The scholarly study
of our collections has become an increasingly
important responsibility as the collections them-
selves have grown in scope and significance;

without this constant evaluation and re-evalua-
tion, the rest of our activities would have in
fact no solid foundation. The research necessary
for a thorough understanding of our acquisi-
tions—research conducted not only in our own
offices, study rooms, and laboratories, but in
other collections, archives, and libraries through-
out the world—involves scholarly labor on a
scale that could hardly have been imagined by
the custodians of our holdings a few genera-
tions ago.

In carrying out such an energetic program to
the limit of its resources, the Museum has be-
come one of the most influential institutions of
its kind in the world. That it has reached this
eminence is a tribute to the thousands of people,
Members and others, who have by their con-
tributions so largely made this possible. As the
recently published Annual Report made abun-
dantly clear, operating the Museum in a way
that does credit to the community and the nation
is a costly enterprise. Many years ago, Alexis de
Tocqueville noted with amazement how through
the voluntary efforts of private individuals
Americans promoted the public welfare in ways
that elsewhere in the world were considered the
concern of government, if they were considered
at all. As the Annual Report also made clear,
it is precisely this sort of private interest and
support upon which the Museum must depend
if it is to continue to maintain the services for
which it has become so widely known.

MARSHALL B. DAVIDSON

The Museum regrets that its Members and
friends have in many cases received numerous
copies of the brochures introducing our new
series of publications *Metropolitan Seminars in Art*.
The promotion and distribution of these monthly
portfolios is handled for the Museum by the
Book-of-the-Month Club. An overlap in lists is
an unfortunate and inevitable feature of such

large-scale mailings. We are, of course, eager to
introduce these unusual publications to the widest
possible audience. If in the course of our doing so
you have received duplicate announcements we
trust that you will overlook any inconvenience
this may have caused, and that you may wish
to pass along your extra copies to others who
have not heard of our new and important project.

J. J. R.

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