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Abstract
This article focuses on the photographs of sculptures, in particular Raffaelle Monti’s veiled figures, taken by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company at the 1862 International Exhibition, to explore the relationship between vision and touch in the appeal of stereographs. Their apparent simplicity as reproductions of works of art belies a rich formal and conceptual complexity that attends to many of the issues raised by the Exhibition and its critics, at the time and since. The appeal of stereographs of sculptures can be conceptualised in the consonance between sculpture and photography as media that relied on mechanical production and reproduction, making the shift from sculpture to stereo one of different iterations rather than translation from one medium to another – both relied on the disavowal of the anonymous, mechanical labour that went into making them.
I am grateful to John Plunkett, Lynda Nead, and Laura Mulvey for their comments on drafts of this paper.
Notes
2. 1 – Thomas Prasch, ‘London 1862’, in Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988, ed. John E. Findling, New York and London: Greenwood Press 1990, 30. This lack of research was confirmed recently by John R. Davis at a Study Day on the 1862 Exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Shipley Group for the History of the Society of Arts, London, 4 February 2012.
3. 2 – Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2006.
4. 3 – David Brewster, ‘Photogenic Drawing’, Edinburgh Review, 76 (January 1843), 312.
5. 4 – The other mechanical inventions to which Brewster related photography were the Electrotype, and ‘The art of multiplying statues by machinery, which we owe to the celebrated James Watts, and which has since been brought to greater perfection’. Brewster, ‘Photogenic Drawing’, 312. A three-dimensional pantograph was eventually perfected by Benjamin Cheverton by 1826 as a ‘Machine for Reproducing Sculpture’. Science Museum, Technical File for object T/1924-292. See also my ‘Editorial: The Sculptural Image in the Nineteenth Century’ in this special issue of History of Photography.
6. 5 – The Times (13 August 1862), 8. As the Art Journal wrote at the end of the Exhibition, stereographs had made the exhibition ‘indestructible and ubiquitous’, and produced ‘a substantial history – such as never before was prepared from any exhibition’. ‘The Stereographs of the Stereoscopic Company’, Art Journal, 11 (November 1862), 223. For a comprehensive study of this aspect of the exhibition, see Britt Salvesen, ‘“The Most Magnificent, Useful, and Interesting Souvenir”: Representations of the International Exhibition of 1862’, Visual Resources, 13:1 (1997), 1–31.
7. 6 – On the use of photography to reproduce works of art in the nineteenth century, see Anthony Hamber, ‘A Higher Branch of The Art’: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839–1880, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach 1996; and, more recently, Art and the Early Photographic Album, ed. Stephen Bann, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2011.
8. 7 – On the popularity of statuettes, see for example Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (1988), Stroud: Sutton Publishing 2003, 126–7. Thad Logan discusses the importance of stereoscopes and statuettes in domestic interiors in The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, 105–201; see also William Merrin, ‘Skylights onto Infinity …: The World in a Stereoscope’, in Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception, ed. Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple, Eastleigh: John Libbey 2005, 161–74.
9. 8 – The process itself is fascinating. When looking through the stereoscope, the two flat images at first seem to hover and tremble from side to side, then they overlap, and a fraction of a second later the planes in the resulting single image separate backwards and forwards creating the three-dimensional effect. When this happens, the sense of scale – of looking at a small image – changes, and the viewer seems to become commensurate to the image.
10. 9 – Brewster, ‘Photogenic Drawing’, 312–13.
11. 10 – On the history of stereoscopy, see Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography (1955; 1969), revised as The Rise of Photography 1850–1880, London: Thames and Hudson 1988, 61–72.
12. 11 – The Times (13 August 1862), 8.
13. 12 – John Plunkett, Optical Recreations: A History of Screen Practices 1780–1914, unpublished manuscript courtesy of the author.
14. 13 – The Times (9 June 1862), 6.
15. 14 – Salvesen, ‘“The Most Magnificent”’, 14.
16. 15 – Graham Wood, ‘Photography at the 1862 International Exhibition in London’, MA thesis in Photographic History, De Montfort University, Leicester, September 2011. Wood owns a large collection of stereographs.
17. 16 – The Times (13 August 1862), 9.
18. 17 – See, for example, Francis Turner Palgrave, Descriptive Handbook to the Fine Art Collections in the International Exhibition of 1862, London and Cambridge: Macmillan 1862, 85–199.
19. 18 – Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition 1862, London and New York: James S. Virtue 1862, 315.
20. 19 – See Rosalind Krauss’s description of looking through the ‘stereoscopic tunnel’ in ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’, Art Journal, 42:4 (winter 1982), 314.
21. 20 – John E. Findling, ‘Introduction’, in Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs, xv–xix.
22. 21 – Louise Purbrick, ‘Introduction’, in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2001, 1–25.
23. 22 – Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1939), in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1999, 18. Benjamin collected notes on the 1862 International Exhibition in ‘Convolute G: Exhibitions, Advertising, Granville’, in Arcades, 171–202, which also includes several extracts from reports of the delegation of 750 French workers to the Exhibition, and the welcoming committee organised by British workers. This meeting of labour activists contributed to the formation in 1864 of the International Workingmen’s Association, best known as the First International, of which Karl Marx became the Chair.
24. 23 – On the history of the phantasmagoria and in Benjamin’s project, see Margaret Cohen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, 48 (autumn 1989), 87–107, and her entry on ‘Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria: the Arcades Project’, in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004, 199–220.
25. 24 – Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), in Benjamin, ‘Convolute G’, 181–2. On Marx’s and Benjamin’s use of the term, see Gyorgy Markus, ‘Walter Benjamin, or: The Commodity as Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, 83 (Spring–Summer 2001), 3–42.
26. 25 – Benjamin, ‘Convolute H: The Collector’, in Arcades, 206–7.
27. 26 – See International Exhibition, 1862: Reports by the Jurors on the Subjects in the Thirty-Six Classes into which the Exhibition Was Divided, London: Society of Arts 1863.
28. 27 – Her Majesty’s Commissioners, International Exhibition 1862, Official Catalogue Fine Art Department, London: Truscott, Son & Simmons 1862.
29. 28 – ‘Photography and the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1862’, Photographic Journal, 7 (June 1861), 205; see also Steve Edwards, ‘Photography, Allegory, and Labor’, Art Journal, 55:2 (1996), 38–44.
30. 29 – For an interesting range of perspectives on commodity fetishism, see Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1993.
31. 30 – Edwards, The Making of English Photography, 13 and 163–201.
32. 31 – Salvesen, ‘“The Most Magnificent”’, 15.
33. 32 – Chatsworth, ‘A Veiled Vestal Virgin’, Art, Library and Archive Collections, www.chatsworth.org/art-and-archives, last accessed 2 July 2013.
34. 33 – Julia Poole, Plagiarism Personified? European Pottery and Porcelain Figures, Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum 1986, 73; and The Fitzwilliam Museum, ‘The Bride’, Fitzwilliam Museum Collection Explorer, www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk.
35. 34 – The Parian Phenomenon: A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain Statuary and Busts, ed. Paul Atterbury, Shepton Beauchamp, England: Richard Dennis 1989; and Robert Copeland, Parian: Copeland’s Statuary Porcelain, London: Antique Collector’s Club 2007. The boom of statuary porcelain is linked to the use of Cheverton’s reducing machine, also exhibited in 1851.
36. 35 – The Times (13 June 1862), 9.
37. 36 – Poole, Plagiarism Personified?, 71.
38. 37 – See also my ‘Photography and Sculpture: A Light Touch’, in Art, History and the Senses, ed. Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2010, 19–34.
39. 38 – The maquette would need a different armature, so The Bride could not have been a re-accessorised Vestal. Monti specialised in veiled figures, based on Raimondo Corradini’s eighteenth-century veiled figures such as Purity (1720–25) now in the Museum of Baroque Art in Venice.
40. 39 – Sculptures were not included in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, but were protected by Sculpture Acts of 1798 and 1814. Alexander Carter-Silk and Michelle Lewiston, The Development of Design Law - Past and Future: From History to Policy, Intellectual Property Office, Crown Copyright 2012, www.ipo.gov.uk, last accessed 2 July 2013; and by the 1850 Provisional and Sculpture Design Act, brought in to cover new designs exhibited at International Exhibitions; see Board of Trade, Records of the Board of Trade, Patents, Design and Trade Marks Office: Provisional and Sculpture Design Act 1850, in the National Archives, Kew.
41. 40 – Penny Guide to the International Exhibition, London: Penny Guides 1862, unpaginated preface.
42. 41 – Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper Exhibitor, London and New York: Cassell 1862, 11.
43. 42 – Campbell’s Visitors Guide to the International Exhibition, London: Campbell 1862, 15.
44. 43 – Reviews of the exhibition can be followed in the scrapbook collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum: Illustrations of the International Exhibition of 1862. Collected from Various Periodicals, and International Exhibition: Special Collections; and at the Royal Society of Art: International Exhibition of 1862: Press Cuttings, six volumes. For a less consumer-oriented view of the exhibition, see The Practical Mechanic’s Journal: Record of the Great Exhibition, London: Green, Longman, and Roberts 1863. See also Bentley’s Miscellany: Impressions of the International Exhibition, London: Bentley 1862. The more recent 3D Expo 1862: A Magic Journey to Victorian England, ed. Michael Tongue, [Stockholm]: Discovery Books 2006, is a good collection on ‘3D Photography at the International Exhibition of 1862, with Stereo Viewer’ (front cover) with quotes from the press at the time.
45. 44 – ‘How a Blind Man Saw the International Exhibition’, Temple Bar, 7 (1863), 227–37.
46. 45 – Samuel Highley, ‘International Exhibition’, British Journal of Photography, 9 (September 1862), 331.
47. 46 – The Times (13 August 1862), 8.
48. 47 – ‘The Stereographs’, 223.
49. 48 – Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2007, 43–104.
50. 49 – Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’ (1859), in Soundings from the Atlantic, Boston: Ticknor and Fields 1864, 142 and 161; emphasis in the original.
51. 50 – Charles Baudelaire on stereoscopy in ‘The Modern Public and Photography’, Art in Paris 1845–1862, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, Oxford: Phaidon 1965, 153.
52. 51 – Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, 140.
53. 52 – Printed Documents and Forms Used in Carrying on the Business of The International Exhibition, 1862, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1863, unpaginated.
54. 53 – See, for example, the Illustrated London News (23 August 1862), 23, showing the Swiss Stand where a mechanical ‘Piping Bullfinch’ had been attracting large crowds.
55. 54 – The Times (23 August 1863), 6.
56. 55 – He also purchased Magni’s Reading Girl. Both were exhibited in the windows of the Stereoscopic Company’s shops in London. See Henry Mayhew, The Shops and Companies of London, London: Stroud Publishing 1865, 93–6.
57. 56 – A reduction of The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy was also available: Copeland, Parian, 117–18.
58. 57 –‘Photographs of the Sculpture of the Great Exhibition’, Art Journal (April 1863), 68.
59. 58 – Thanks to John Duguid for allowing me to compare stereograph and statuette in a domestic interior.
60. 59 – Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, 331.
61. 60 – Jonathan Crary on stereoscopy in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992, 125; see also Carol Mavor on ‘Queer Stereo’ in Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Lady Hawarden, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 1999, 107–28.
62. 61 – Captain Francis Fowke designed the building.
63. 62 – Punch (September 1862), 135.