Herschel's chrysotype: A golden legend re-told

Abstract

From the beginnings of photography, gold was considered as a potential imaging substance and in 1842 Sir John Herschel succeeded in inventing an iron-based process called chrysotype for making contact-prints in gold. Despite their stability, the process failed to compete with Talbot's silver photography and never gained acceptance into the photographic repertoire owing to its expense and technical difficulty. Nonetheless, there were sporadic attempts to ‘re-invent’ gold printing — with little success — until the close of the nineteenth century, by which time gold had been condemned as ‘useless’ per se for photographic imaging, despite its extensive employment for toning silver images to improve their stability and colour. In the alternative process revival of the 1980s, however, the application of some modern chemistry enabled an economic chrysotype printing process that competes with platinotype in image quality, thus vindicating Herschel's original visionary idea.

Keywords::

• gold printing
• chrysotype
• aurotype
• siderotype
• iron-based process
• alternative photographic process
• Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792–1871)
• Alfred Smee (1818–1877)
• Robert Hunt (1807–1887)
• Antoine Hércules Romuald Florence (1804–1879)
• William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (1809–1889)
• John Mercer (1791–1866)
• Charles John Burnett (1820–1907)
• John Muir Wood (1805–1892)
• John William Draper (1811–1882)
• Thomas Henry Hennah
• Alfred Jarman
• Duc de Luynes
• Chapman Jones