First Photographing. Two signed pencil drawings.
CRUIKSHANK, (George).
Original pencil drawings, signed at the foot of the image, both with extensive marginalia. Sheet size 114 x 184 mm, central image size c. 100 x 95 mm. Studies and the finished artwork for an illustration to George Cruikshank's Omnibus, published as a wood-engraving in 1842, under the title "Photographic Phenomena, or the new School of Portrait-Painting." London [1841-1842].
We believe these drawings to be the earliest representations of a professional photographer's studio. The engraving derived from them is well-known, and is reproduced in most of the reference books on early photography.
The subject is Richard Beard's studio, on the roof of the Polytechnic Institution on Regent Street in London, which opened in 1841, as Europe's first commercial photographic studio, beaten by a few months by Wolcott and Johnson of New York, whose patents Beard used. It was a raging success, and London society, or at least the middle part of it (for the introduction of the daguerreotype was a democratising development, in which for the first time portraiture was available to a wide class of people) queued to be captured. The studio was naturally lit, with a glazed ceiling, and the sitter was placed on a substantial dais which could be turned with the sunlight. The operator is shown consulting his watch for the exposure time, which was typically 20 seconds or so, and earlier customers are shown bottom left examining their portraits, rather pointedly through magnifying glasses. In the drawing the open door to the right of the image shows a crowd of waiting customers, whereas in the engraving this shows technical apparatus.
The marginal drawings are interesting, including vigorous representations of both sitter and photographer as Bottom, with the head of an ass and the body of a man.
The engraving appeared alongside Leman Blanchard's engaging doggerel verse about the new medium which contrasts the traditional portrait artist with its new competitor, the sun: "Apollo turned R.A. the other day".
The verse confronts what Philip Larkin later described as the camera's "faithful and disappointing" candour: "But truth is unpleasant / To prince and to peasant / You recollect Lawrence, and think of the graces / That Chalon and Company gave to their faces."
Cruikshank had been the most prominent caricaturist of his day (like the earlier Gillray he was once salaried by the King with the express intention that he no longer draw him) and in 1842 was the most successful comic illustrator of the day. In the mid-nineteenth century the reproduction of drawings by wood and steel-engraving made possible the first great boom in popular book and periodical production, and Cruikshank was one of its masters. The verse ends with the line "You fancy the 'last day of drawing' has come", and it is tempting to see this as the sardonic commentary of a master of the old technology on the brave new world.
Cruikshank.
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Probable Effects of Over Female Emigration, (1851)
