The painted photograph

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1998 by Heinz K. Henisch

One of the many crosscurrents between the two fields of artistic endeavor was the enhancement of photographs with color. Although routinely despised by lofty critics, the painted photograph remains a significant part of photographic, social, and art history.(*)

The daguerreotype was a revelation. No one had ever seen anything like it before. No painter could ever hope to reproduce so much detail in so small a space. Yet almost uniformly the realism of the daguerreotype was seen as a plus and the lack of color as a distinct minus.

It represented an uncanny mixture of the lifelike and the lifeless. The remedy was provided by Johann Baptist Isenring (1769-1860), a copperplate engraver from Sankt Gallen, Switzerland. In October 1839, the year of its invention, he ordered a daguerreotype outfit from Paris and became remarkably successful as a portraitist. This was due in part to the prevalence of ultraviolet light in the high alpine region, which allowed shorter exposures. Isenring was also the first to retouch and overpaint his daguerreotypes with oil-based pigments.

The Isenring coloring techniques were widely imitated and improved. The American daguerreotype shown in Plate VII has been painted with translucent pigments dissolved in alcohol, which suited the medium because it yielded delicate tints rather than the heavy impasto of oil-based paint. On an endearing, if humbler, level, one finds an occasional dog portrait in which only the dogs tongue was colored. The remarkable thing in these cases is that the image was made at all, considering the long exposure time and the restlessness of the subject. Another example of selective overpainting shows a single member of a group picked out in color (see PI. IV). More frequently encountered are portraits of uniformed military men in which only buttons and insignia have been picked out in gold. Overpainting was not confined to studio portraits but was used with equal enthusiasm for photographs of gardens and the countryside.

Portrait painters, their livelihood threatened by the advent of the photograph, frequently became photographers themselves or colorists in photographers' studios. It may indeed be that some of the best painted photographs were overpainted by artists.

Photography on paper is exactly as old as daguerreotypy, having been invented by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) in England in 1839. Talbot was no great admirer of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851), but he paid him one tribute by calling his own photographs after himself. Some talbotypes were indeed very beautiful, with a soft, velvety tone, but they could not compare to daguerreotypes in terms of sharp definition and sparkle. Moreover, whereas daguerreotypes were fairly permanent, talbotypes tended to fade in time. The magazine Punch drew a poignant parallel between the paper photograph and love, both tending to vanish with time. The fading problem was so serious that Prince Albert himself urged the Photographic Society of London (now the Royal Photographic Society) to set up its Fading Committee in 1855. After many sessions the committee correctly diagnosed all the causes of fading without being able to suggest effective remedies beyond washing prints carefully and protecting them from light.

Talbot's friend Henry Collen (1800-1875), a miniature painter who taught Queen Victoria how to paint in watercolors and who was the first professional calotypist in London, first began retouching paper photographs with a pencil so that at least something would be left when the photographic image had faded years later. Monochromatic retouching was soon used to increase contrast and embellish facial features, sometimes to whimsical effect (see Pl. V). By contrast the hand-colored talbotype (salt print) shown in Plate III is a work of considerable refinement and good taste. It is not surprising that such a picture should have been treasured as a more fitting keepsake than a plain photograph. The photograph in Plate I is an ambrotype (a negative transparency on glass) that has been hand-tinted on the emulsion side so that it is in a sense under- rather than overpainted.

In due course the retoucher became a full-fledged overpainter. The pencil, still not in common use at the time, was soon followed by the charcoal stick, crayon, watercolor, and oil paint (see Pls. VI, VIII, IX, XI, and XIII). All this was necessary, for in the mid-1850s there was a slump in the photographic business in the United States. The invention of color photography was confidently, and erroneously, expected within a short time, when in fact it was half a century away. In the circumstances, over-painters attempted to fill the gap.

The tintype, a collodion image on a lacquered sheet of iron, became popular during the Civil War as a durable memorial. This presented the overpainter with a much more robust surface than the paper photograph or the silvered surface of the daguerreotype. The tintype did not respond to pencil or crayon but called for oil paint. The one in Plate X, a tintype enlargement, is heavily overpainted, including the chain The one shown in Plate XII has more pleasing artistic coloring.