Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX.

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We take a piece of this paper of the proper size, and lay it on the
varnished or pictured side of the negative, which is itself laid in a
wooden frame, like a picture-frame. Then we place a thick piece of cloth
on the paper. Then we lay a hinged wooden back on the cloth, and by means
of two brass springs press all close together,--the wooden back against
the cloth, the cloth against the paper, the paper against the negative. We
turn the frame over and see that the plain side of the glass negative is
clean. And now we step out upon the roof of the house into the bright
sunshine, and lay the frame, with the glass uppermost, in the full blaze
of light. For a very little while we can see the paper darkening through
the negative, but presently it clouds so much that its further changes
cannot be recognized. When we think it has darkened nearly enough, we turn
it over, open a part of the hinged back, turn down first a portion of the
thick cloth, and then enough of the paper to see something of the forming
picture. If not printed dark enough as yet, we turn back to their places
successively the picture, the cloth, the opened part of the frame, and lay
it again in the sun. It is just like cooking: the sun is the fire, and the
picture is the cake; when it is browned exactly to the right point, we
take it off the fire. A photograph-printer will have fifty or more
pictures printing at once, and he keeps going up and down the line,
opening the frames to look and see how they are getting on. As fast as
they are done, he turns them over, back to the sun, and the cooking
process stops at once.

The pictures which have just been printed in the sunshine are of a
peculiar purple tint, and still sensitive to the light, which will first
"flatten them out," and finally darken the whole paper, if they are
exposed to it before the series of processes which "fixes" and "tones"
them. They are kept shady, therefore, until a batch is ready to go down to
the toning room.

When they reach that part of the establishment, the first thing that is
done with them is to throw them face down upon the surface of a salt bath.
Their purple changes at once to a dull red. They are then washed in clean
water for a few minutes, and after that laid, face up, in a solution of
chloride of gold with a salt of soda. Here they must lie for some minutes
at least; for the change, which we can watch by the scanty daylight
admitted, goes on slowly. Gradually they turn to a darker shade; the
reddish tint becomes lilac, purple, brown, of somewhat different tints in
different cases. When the process seems to have gone far enough, the
picture is thrown into a bath containing hyposulphite of soda, which
dissolves the superfluous, unstable compounds, and rapidly clears up the
lighter portions of the picture. On being removed from this, it is
thoroughly washed, dried, and mounted, by pasting it with starch or
dextrine to a card of the proper size.

The reader who has followed the details of the process may like to know
what are the common difficulties the beginner meets with.

The first is in coating the glass with collodion. It takes some practice
to learn to do this neatly and uniformly.

The second is in timing the immersion in the nitrate-of-silver bath. This
is easily overcome; the glass may be examined by the feeble lamp-light at
the end of two or three minutes, and if the surface looks streaky,
replunged in the bath for a minute or two more, or until the surface looks
smooth.

The third is in getting an exact focus in the camera, which wants good
eyes, or strong glasses for poor ones.

The fourth is in timing the exposure. This is the most delicate of all the
processes. Experience alone can teach the time required with different
objects in different lights. Here are four card-portraits from a negative
taken from one of Barry's crayon-pictures, illustrating an experiment
which will prove very useful to the beginner. The negative of No. 1 was
exposed only two seconds. The young lady's face is very dusky on a very
dusky ground. The lights have hardly come out at all. No. 2 was exposed
five seconds. Undertimed, but much cleared up. No. 3 was exposed fifteen
seconds, about the proper time. It is the best of the series, but the
negative ought to have been intensified. It looks as if Miss E.V. had
washed her face since the five-seconds picture was taken. No. 4 was
exposed sixty seconds, that is to say, three or four times too long. It
has a curious resemblance to No. 1, but is less dusky. The contrasts of
light and shade which gave life to No. 3 have disappeared, and the face
looks as if a second application of soap would improve it. A few trials of
this kind will teach the eye to recognize the appearances of under- and
over-exposure, so that, if the first negative proves to have been too long
or too short a time in the camera, the proper period of exposure for the
next may be pretty easily determined.

The printing from the negative is less difficult, because we can examine
the picture as often as we choose; but it may be well to undertime and
overtime some pictures, for the sake of a lesson like that taught by the
series of pictures from the four negatives.

The only other point likely to prove difficult is the toning in the gold
bath. As the picture can be watched, however, a very little practice will
enable us to recognize the shade which indicates that this part of the
process is finished.

* * * * *

We have copied a picture, but we can take a portrait from Nature just as
easily, except for a little more trouble in adjusting the position and
managing the light. So easy is it to reproduce the faces that we love to
look upon; so simple is that marvellous work by which we preserve the
first smile of infancy and the last look of age: the most precious gift
Art ever bestowed upon love and friendship!

It will be observed that the glass plate, covered with its film of
collodion, was removed directly from the nitrate-of-silver bath to the
camera, so as to be exposed to its image while still wet. It is obvious
that this process is one that can hardly be performed conveniently at a
distance from the artist's place of work. Solutions of nitrate of silver
are not carried about and decanted into baths and back again into bottles
without tracking their path on persons and things. The _photophobia_ of
the "sensitized" plate, of course, requires a dark apartment of some kind:
commonly a folding tent is made to answer the purpose in photographic
excursions. It becomes, therefore, a serious matter to transport all that
is required to make a negative according to the method described. It has
consequently been a great desideratum to find some way of preparing a
sensitive plate which could be dried and laid away, retaining its
sensitive quality for days or weeks until wanted. The artist would then
have to take with him nothing but his camera and his dry sensitive plates.
After exposing these in the camera, they would be kept in dark boxes until
he was ready to develop them at leisure on returning to his _atelier_.

Many "dry methods" have been contrived, of which the _tannin process_ is
in most favor. The plate, after being "sensitized" and washed, is plunged
in a bath containing ten grains of tannin to an ounce of water. It is then
dried, and may be kept for a long time without losing its sensitive
quality. It is placed dry in the camera, and developed by wetting it and
then pouring over it a mixture of pyrogallic acid and the solution of
nitrate of silver. Amateurs find this the best way for taking scenery, and
produce admirable pictures by it, as we shall mention by-and-by.

* * * * *

In our former articles we have spoken principally of stereoscopic
pictures. These are still our chief favorites for scenery, for
architectural objects, for almost everything but portraits,--and even
these last acquire a reality in the stereoscope which they can get in no
other way. In this third photographic excursion we must only touch briefly
upon the stereograph. Yet we have something to add to what we said before
on this topic.

One of the most interesting accessions to our collection is a series of
twelve views, on glass, of scenes and objects in California, sent us with
unprovoked liberality by the artist, Mr. Watkins. As specimens of art they
are admirable, and some of the subjects are among the most interesting to
be found in the whole realm of Nature. Thus, the great tree, the "Grizzly
Giant," of Mariposa, is shown in two admirable views; the mighty precipice
of El Capitan, more than three thousand feet in precipitous height,--the
three conical hill-tops of Yo Semite, taken, not as they soar into the
atmosphere, but as they are reflected in the calm waters below,--these and
others are shown, clear, yet soft, vigorous in the foreground, delicately
distinct in the distance, in a perfection of art which compares with the
finest European work.

The "London Stereoscopic Company" has produced some very beautiful paper
stereographs, very dear, but worth their cost, of the Great Exhibition.
There is one view, which we are fortunate enough to possess, that is a
marvel of living detail,--one of the series showing the opening
ceremonies. The picture gives principally the musicians. By careful
counting, we find there are _six hundred faces to the square inch_ in the
more crowded portion of the scene which the view embraces,--a part
occupied by the female singers. These singers are all clad in white, and
packed with great compression of crinoline,--if that, indeed, were worn on
the occasion. Mere points as their faces seem to the naked eye, the
stereoscope, and still more a strong magnifier, shows them with their
mouths all open as they join in the chorus, and with such distinctness
that some of them might readily be recognized by those familiar with their
aspect. This, it is to be remembered, is not a reduced stereograph for the
microscope, but a common one, taken as we see them taken constantly.

We find in the same series several very good views of Gibson's famous
colored "Venus," a lady with a pleasant face and a very pretty pair of
shoulders. But the grand "Cleopatra" of our countryman, Mr. Story, of
which we have heard so much, was not to be had,--why not we cannot say,
for a stereograph of it would have had an immense success in America, and
doubtless everywhere.

The London Stereoscopic Company has also furnished us with views of Paris,
many of them instantaneous, far in advance of the earlier ones of Parisian
origin. Our darling little church of St. Etienne du Mont, for instance,
with its staircase and screen of stone embroidery, its carved oaken pulpit
borne on the back of a carved oaken Samson, its old monuments, its stained
windows, is brought back to us in all its minute detail as we remember it
in many a visit made on our way back from the morning's work at La Pitie
to the late breakfast at the Cafe Procope. Some of the instantaneous views
are of great perfection, and carry us as fairly upon the Boulevards as Mr.
Anthony transports us to Broadway. With the exception of this series, we
have found very few new stereoscopic pictures in the market for the last
year or two. This is not so much owing to the increased expense of
importing foreign views as to the greater popularity _of card-portraits_,
which, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the
sentimental "green-backs" of civilization, within a very recent period.

We, who have exhausted our terms of admiration in describing the
stereoscopic picture, will not quarrel with the common taste which prefers
the card-portrait. The last is the cheapest, the most portable, requires
no machine to look at it with, can be seen by several persons at the same
time,--in short, has all the popular elements. Many care little for the
wonders of the world brought before their eyes by the stereoscope; all
love to see the faces of their friends. Jonathan does not think a great
deal of the Venus of Milo, but falls into raptures over a card-portrait of
his Jerusha. So far from finding fault with him, we rejoice rather that
his affections and those of average mortality are better developed than
their taste; and lost as we sometimes are in contemplation of the shadowy
masks of ugliness which hang in the frames of the photographers, as the
skins of beasts are stretched upon tanners' fences, we still feel
grateful, when we remember the days of itinerant portrait-painters, that
the indignities of Nature are no longer intensified by the outrages of
Art.

The sitters who throng the photographer's establishment are a curious
study. They are of all ages, from the babe in arms to the old wrinkled
patriarchs and dames whose smiles have as many furrows as an ancient elm
has rings that count its summers. The sun is a Rembrandt in his way, and
loves to track all the lines in these old splintered faces. A photograph
of one of them is like one of those fossilized sea-beaches where the
raindrops have left their marks, and the shellfish the grooves in which
they crawled, and the wading birds the divergent lines of their
foot-prints,--tears, cares, griefs, once vanishing as impressions from the
sand, now fixed as the vestiges in the sand-stone.

Attitudes, dresses, features, hands, feet, betray the social grade of the
candidates for portraiture. The picture tells no lie about them. There is
no use in their putting on airs; the make-believe gentleman and lady
cannot look like the genuine article. Mediocrity shows itself for what it
is worth, no matter what temporary name it may have acquired. Ill-temper
cannot hide itself under the simper of assumed amiability. The
querulousness of incompetent complaining natures confesses itself almost
as much as in the tones of the voice. The anxiety which strives to smooth
its forehead cannot get rid of the telltale furrow. The weakness which
belongs to the infirm of purpose and vacuous of thought is hardly to be
disguised, even though the moustache is allowed to hide _the centre of
expression_.

All parts of a face doubtless have their fixed relations to each other and
to the character of the person to whom the face belongs. But there is one
feature, and especially one part of that feature, which more than any
other facial sign reveals the nature of the individual. The feature is
_the mouth_, and the portion of it referred to is _the corner_. A circle
of half an inch radius, having its centre at the junction of the two lips
will include the chief focus of expression.

This will be easily understood, if we reflect that here is the point where
more muscles of expression converge than at any other. From above comes
the elevator of the angle of the mouth; from the region of the cheek-bone
slant downwards the two _zygomatics_, which carry the angle outwards and
upwards; from behind comes the _buccinator_, or trumpeter's muscle, which
simply widens the mouth by drawing the corners straight outward; from
below, the depressor of the angle; not to add a seventh, sometimes well
marked,--the "laughing muscle" of Santorini. Within the narrow circle
where these muscles meet the ring of muscular fibres surrounding the mouth
the battles of the soul record their varying fortunes and results. This is
the "_noeud vital_"--to borrow Flourens's expression with reference to a
nervous centre,--the _vital knot_ of expression. Here we may read the
victories and defeats, the force, the weakness, the hardness, the
sweetness of a character. Here is the nest of that feeble fowl,
self-consciousness, whose brood strays at large over all the features.

If you wish to see the very look your friend wore when his portrait was
taken, let not the finishing artist's pencil intrude within the circle of
the vital knot of expression.

We have learned many curious facts from photographic portraits which we
were slow to learn from faces. One is the great number of aspects
belonging to each countenance with which we are familiar. Sometimes, in
looking at a portrait, it seems to us that this is just the face we know,
and that it is always thus. But again another view shows us a wholly
different aspect, and yet as absolutely characteristic as the first; and a
third and a fourth convince us that our friend was not one, but many, in
outward appearance, as in the mental and emotional shapes by which his
inner nature made itself known to us.

Another point which must have struck everybody who has studied
photographic portraits is the family likeness that shows itself throughout
a whole wide connection. We notice it more readily than in life, from the
fact that we bring many of these family-portraits together and study them
more at our ease. There is something in the face that corresponds to
_tone_ in the voice,--recognizable, not capable of description; and this
kind of resemblance in the faces of kindred we may observe, though the
features are unlike. But the features themselves are wonderfully tenacious
of their old patterns. The Prince of Wales is getting to look like George
III. We noticed it when he was in this country; we see it more plainly in
his recent photographs. Governor Endicott's features have come straight
down to some of his descendants in the present day. There is a dimpled
chin which runs through one family connection we have studied, and a
certain form of lip which belongs to another. As our _cheval de bataille_
stands ready saddled and bridled for us just now, we must indulge
ourselves in mounting him for a brief excursion. This is a story we have
told so often that we should begin to doubt it but for the fact that we
have before us the written statement of the person who was its subject.
His professor, who did not know his name or anything about him, stopped
him one day after lecture and asked him if he was not a relation of
Mr. ----, a person of some note in Essex County.--Not that he had ever
heard of.--The professor thought he must be,--would he inquire?--Two or
three days afterwards, having made inquiries at his home in Middlesex
County, he reported that an elder member of the family informed him that
Mr. ----'s great-grandfather on his mother's side and his own
great-grandfather on his father's side were own cousins. The whole class
of facts, of which this seems to us too singular an instance to be lost,
is forcing itself into notice, with new strength of evidence, through the
galleries of photographic family-portraits which are making everywhere.

In the course of a certain number of years there will have been developed
some new physiognomical results, which will prove of extreme interest to
the physiologist and the moralist. They will take time; for, to bring some
of them out fully, a generation must be followed from its cradle to its
grave.

The first is a precise study of the effects of age upon the features. Many
series of portraits taken at short intervals through life, studied
carefully side by side, will probably show to some acute observer that
Nature is very exact in the tallies that mark the years of human life.

The second is to result from a course of investigations which we would
rather indicate than follow out; for, if the student of it did not fear
the fate of Phalaris,--that he should find himself condemned as
unlifeworthy upon the basis of his own observations,--he would very
certainly become the object of eternal hatred to the proprietors of all
the semi-organizations which he felt obliged to condemn. It consists in
the study of the laws of physical degeneration,--the stages and
manifestations of the process by which Nature dismantles the complete and
typical human organism, until it becomes too bad for her own sufferance,
and she kills it off before the advent of the reproductive period, that it
may not permanently depress her average of vital force by taking part in
the life of the race. There are many signs that fall far short of the
marks of cretinism,--yet just as plain as that is to the _visus
eruditus_,--which one meets every hour of the day in every circle of
society. Many of these are partial arrests of development. We do not care
to mention all which we think may be recognized, but there is one which we
need not hesitate to speak of from the fact that it is so exceedingly
common.

The vertical part of the lower jaw is short, and the angle of the jaw is
obtuse, in infancy. When the physical development is complete, the lower
jaw, which, as the active partner in the business of mastication, must be
developed in proportion to the vigor of the nutritive apparatus, comes
down by a rapid growth which gives the straight-cut posterior line and the
bold right angle so familiar to us in the portraits of pugilists,
exaggerated by the caricaturists in their portraits of fighting men, and
noticeable in well-developed persons of all classes. But in imperfectly
grown adults the jaw retains the infantile character,--the short vertical
portion necessarily implying the obtuse angle. The upper jaw at the same
time fails to expand laterally: in vigorous organisms it spreads out
boldly, and the teeth stand square and with space enough; whereas in
subvitalized persons it remains narrow, as in the child, so that the large
front teeth are crowded, or slanted forward, or thrown out of line. This
want of lateral expansion is frequently seen in the jaws, upper and lower,
of the American, and has been considered a common cause of caries of the
teeth.

A third series of results will relate to the effect of character in
moulding the features. Go through a "rogues' gallery" and observe what the
faces of the most hardened villains have in common. All these villanous
looks have been shaped out of the unmeaning lineaments of infancy. The
police-officers know well enough the expression of habitual crime. Now, if
all this series of faces had been carefully studied in photographs from
the days of innocence to those of confirmed guilt, there is no doubt that
a keen eye might recognize, we will not say the first evil volition in the
change it wrought upon the face, nor each successive stage in the downward
process of the falling nature, but epochs and eras, with differential
marks, as palpable perhaps as those which separate the aspects of the
successive decades of life. And what is far pleasanter, when the character
of a neglected and vitiated child is raised by wise culture, the converse
change will be found--nay, has been found--to record itself unmistakably
upon the faithful page of the countenance; so that charitable institutions
have learned that their strongest appeal lies in the request, "Look on
this picture, and on that,"--the lawless boy at his entrance, and the
decent youth at his dismissal.

The field of photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of
strange and sometimes of fearful interest. We have referred in a former
article to a stereograph in a friend's collection showing the bodies of
the slain heaped up for burial after the Battle of Malignano. We have now
before us a series of photographs showing the field of Antietam and the
surrounding country, as they appeared after the great battle of the 17th
of September. These terrible mementos of one of the most sanguinary
conflicts of the war we owe to the enterprise of Mr. Brady of New York. We
ourselves were on the field upon the Sunday following the Wednesday when
the battle took place. It is not, however, for us to bear witness to the
fidelity of views which the truthful sunbeam has delineated in all their
dread reality. The photographs bear witness to the accuracy of some of our
own sketches in a paper published in the December number of this magazine.
The "ditch" is figured, still encumbered with the dead, and strewed, as we
saw it and the neighboring fields, with fragments and tatters. The
"colonel's gray horse" is given in another picture just as we saw him
lying.

Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of
illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps
or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday. How dear to
their little circles far away most of them!--how little cared for here by
the tired party whose office it is to consign them to the earth! An
officer may here and there be recognized; but for the rest--if enemies,
they will be counted, and that is all. "80 Rebels are buried in this hole"
was one of the epitaphs we read and recorded. Many people would not look
through this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors,
would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt
those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting
the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by
the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and
wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet
as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly
represented. Yet war and battles should have truth for their delineator.
It is well enough for some Baron Gros or Horace Vernet to please an
imperial master with fanciful portraits of what they are supposed to be.
The honest sunshine

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