The Transparency of Color: Aesthetics, Materials, and Practices of Hand Coloring Photographs between...

The Transparency of Color: Aesthetics, Materials, and Practices of Hand Coloring Photographsbetween Rochester and YokohamaAuthor(s): Ann-Sophie LehmannSource: Getty Research Journal, No. 7 (2015), pp. 81-96Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the J. Paul Getty TrustStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/680736 .

Accessed: 05/02/2015 11:39

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and J. Paul Getty Trust are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Getty Research Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 192.215.101.254 on Thu, 5 Feb 2015 11:39:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jpgt

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/680736?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Getty Research Journal, no. 7 (2015): 81–96 © 2015 Ann-Sophie Lehmann

81

In recent histories of early photography, the quest for the reproduction of color is often

framed as resulting from a disappointment with the new medium’s lack of ability to do

so.1 A brief look at early writings from within the photographic community tells us that,

rather than voicing disappointment, practitioners and scientists stated the absence of

color matter-of-factly, describing what the images looked like to those not yet acquainted

with them.2 While colors were not reproduced on a larger scale until the Lumière

brothers patented the autochrome technique in 1903, the expectation that photography

would eventually be able to do so was there right from the start. As early as 1841, the

English scientist and pioneering photographer Robert Hunt published a treatise on fixing

photographic images on papers colored with diverse chemicals.3 His experiment with

silver nitrate had “the most pleasing result of bringing within the range of probabilities,

the reproduction of photographic pictures in their natural colours.”4 Eight years later,

the American Henry Hunt Snelling published a synopsis of Hunt’s treatise in his History

and Practice of the Art of Photography (1849), relating the Englishman’s findings to the

reproduction of color as an ongoing scientific endeavor, from which he expected a

positive outcome in the long run:

Some advances have been made towards producing photographic impressions in

color [. . .] The day may still be remote when this much to be desired desideratum

shall be accomplished in portrait taking; but I am led to hope that future experi-

ments may master the secret which now causes it to be looked upon, by many, as

an impossibility.5

Snelling’s phrasing is a typical instance of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s

reconceptualization of progress as dynamically interrelated “horizons of expectation

and spaces of experience.”6 While Snelling anticipated color at the horizon of the

emerging technology for the applied context of portrait photography, painting and

hand tinting constituted a “lived space of experience” in the photographic portrait

production of his time. Hence, until color reproduction materialized, photographers

would be instructed in a correct and above all tasteful manner of hand coloring,

Photography’s Past Futures The Transparency of Color: Aesthetics, Materials, and Practices of Hand Coloring Photographs between Rochester and YokohamaAnn-Sophie Lehmann



82 gett y research journal, no. 7 (2015)

and Snelling’s chapter “The Probability of Producing Colored Pictures by the Solar

Radiations” is followed by instructions “On Coloring Daguerreotypes,” though in

general he doubts “the propriety of coloring the daguerreotype” and thinks most results

“absolutely disgusting.”7

This apparently contradictory attitude reflects the friction between photographic

ideals (including the expectation of the accurate reproduction of color) and actual

practices, a friction frequently expressed in contemporary writings.8 François Arago, for

example, famously compared the daguerreotype’s fragility, iridescence, and precision

to butterfly wings and manual coloring to a sign painter crudely smearing over this

delicate invention of nature.9 Yet it is exactly through the comparison of black-and-

white pictures to vivid butterflies that the desire for color becomes palpable: more

than anything else, monochrome butterfly wings beg to be colored. Arago himself, who

owned a large collection of exotic butterflies, must have been acutely aware of this flaw

in his beautiful metaphor, exemplified here in the portrait of an anonymous collector

(fig. 1).10 Therefore, as soon as photographs had assumed stable material formats that

allowed for standardized production and sale, hand tinting became a fact despite the

purist convictions voiced by Arago and others. Hand-tinted photography far surpassed

the autochrome, and it remained an easy and cheap way to enhance black-and-white

Fig. 1. Butterfly Collector, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1850, daguerreotype, 7.0 × 8.2 cm (2 3⁄4 × 3 1⁄2 in.).

Rochester, New York, George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film (GEH

NEG: 5651). Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film



Lehmann Transparency of Color 83

images until color photography became available to a wide consumer market in the 1940s.

Interestingly, while color was certainly meant to heighten photography’s reference to

reality, the exact relation between the referent and its color seems of secondary relevance

to the practice. For instance, rather than recommending observation of the colors of a

photographed model, Snelling urges the daguerreotype painter to visit artists’ studios

and art galleries to study “various styles of coloring.”11 Another contemporary source

even distinguishes between the styles of different colorists.12 Accordingly, the many

handbooks that would follow Snelling’s discuss the coloring of daguerreotypes (and soon

after, of photographs on paper) as an art and craft for which the nature, light-fastness,

and transparency of color materials, the preparation of the surface, and the application

of the colors were just as important as the questions of which colors were suitable for a

particular pictorial element and of how hand coloring would shift the photograph from

the domain of reproduction to that of art. Hand coloring also provided for a new line of

employment in photography studios and stimulated manufacturers of photographic

materials to develop and market special photographic colors from the 1850s onward.13

Snelling’s History and Practice of the Art of Photography thus demonstrates that the

expectation of and experimentation with color “in the camera”14 was closely intertwined

with the practice of manual coloring. Historical studies of early photography, however,

have separated these strands and generally present what seems like two distinct

histories: a dominant strand that tells about the diverse chemical procedures developed

throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to generate photographs in

color, and a marginal strand that describes the coloring of photographs with watercolors,

oil, or pastels. This article aims to show that the precise intersection between these

histories is extremely important for the study of color in early photography. Apart from

the photographs themselves, an important source for research into these convergent

histories are how-to manuals such as Snelling’s, which in many cases were commissioned

by manufacturers of either photographic equipment or artistic materials.15

The collections of the Getty Research Institute hold a particularly remarkable

how-to manual, an inconspicuous booklet titled Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-

Colors, first published by Charles F. Nicholson in 1902 and, according to the title page,

to be used for “the artistic tinting of photographs, lantern slides, half-tones, magazine

prints and process work of all kinds where a perfectly transparent color is required”

(figs. 2, 3).16 Printed in several editions, the manual is not unique in terms of quantity

but entirely exceptional in its genre because it contains not only instructions on how to

color but also the materials to do so. Following the pages with instructions, the colors

are pressed in a dry film on fifteen single sheets of paper in as many tints, ranging from

“Brilliant Yellow” to “Pearl Gray.” Each color is accompanied by a short text that stresses

the particular characteristics and applications of the color (figs. 4, 5). Small strips of the

color sheets are to be cut and dissolved in water, after which the paper can be removed,

leaving the colors ready to use. A closer look at this literally colorful manual, its maker,

and its context provides new insights into the chemistry and aesthetics of hand-coloring




Fig. 2. Cover. From Charles F. Nicholson, Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors (Boston, New

York, and Tokyo: Japanese Water-Color Co., 1902), paper, 20 × 8 cm (8 7⁄8 × 3 1⁄4 in.). Los Angeles, Getty

Research Institute (86-b26647)

Fig. 3. Title Page. From Charles F. Nicholson, Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors (Boston, New

York, and Tokyo: Japanese Water-Color Co., 1902), paper, 20 × 8 cm (8 7⁄8 × 3 1⁄4 in.). Los Angeles, Getty

Research Institute (86-b26647)




Figs. 4, 5. Instructions and color material for “No. 6 Japonica Scarlet.” From Charles F. Nicholson’s

Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors (Boston, New York, and Tokyo: Japanese Water-Color Co.,

1902), paper and colorant, each page: 20 × 8 cm (8 7⁄8 × 3 1⁄4 in.). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute

(86-b26647)




photographs in the United States around 1900 and into a particular instance of the cross-

cultural transmission of coloring effects and practices between the United States and

Japan. Guided by the three adjectives of the booklet’s title — “peerless,” “Japanese,”and

“transparent”— the following analysis serves as a lens through which we can review the

relation between actual and applied color in early photography.

Compared to the photographic coloring materials commercially available at

the time, Nicholson’s colors were doubtless marketed as “peerless” because of their

format. The pressed material, as the accompanying text points out, leaves no residue

on the tinted picture, distinguishing it from other available formats such as color cakes

or bottled inks containing solvents. The booklet was also much lighter and easier to

transport than the average coloring kit consisting of glass bottles with premixed colors.

The attribute “transparent” seems an obviously desirable quality, because opaque

colors would cover up the photo. Yet in the early history of coloring photographs,

opacity and transparency were equally considered, and the preference for transparency

only developed gradually, together with a particular photographic aesthetic and the

chemical composition of the coloring media.17 As we will see later on, the transparency

of Nicholson’s colors is directly related to their chemical make-up, just like their “self-

blending” quality announced on the cover of the booklet (see fig. 2).

But let us first turn to the attribute “Japanese,” which seems far more mysterious

than the other two. What was the advantage of having such Japanese colors, and were

they really Japanese? The first page of the instructional text provides some general

explanations, stating that “the art of transparent tinting had its origin in Japan and

the wonderful skill of the Japanese artists in this line of work has excited universal

admiration,” without providing any further information to support this claim.18 On the

following pages, the hands-on process of coloring is explained using an engraving of

George Boughton’s not-at-all-Japanese painting The Pilgrim Exiles (1875), a reproduction

of which could be purchased by postal order for practice. Throughout the book, the colors’

Japaneseness is alluded to by a set of five Japanese characters that appears on several pages

and vaguely translate the manual’s title; by the color “Japonica Scarlet” (“a very useful

color for interiors, garments etc. and valuable in flower work,” see figs. 4, 5); and most

decisively through the listing of “Tokio, Japan” between Boston and New York on the title

page. While the two latter cities are complemented with a postal address, Tokyo is not.

A closer look at Charles F. Nicholson, the publisher and inventor of the colors,

may shed some more light on their proposed Japanese origin. Nicholson is recorded

as a dyer in the 1879 city directory of Rochester, New York, together with other family

members who were painters, gilders, and dyers.19 George Nicholson, presumably

Charles’s father, had come from England to Rochester, established the East Side Dye

House on Kelly Street in 1870, and by 1872 sold his own “Nicholson’s blue aniline dye”

for textiles.20 After their initial discovery in Germany in the 1830s and the first industrial

production in England in the 1850s, synthetic, aniline-based dyes were produced

in Germany, France, and England, and exported on a global scale.21 The bright colors




quickly conquered the textile and paint industries and had a profound impact on popular

visual and material culture, including fashion, advertisements, and artificially colored

flowers.22 They also played a key role in the development of the autochrome technology,

as the potato starch particles enabling the process of selective color reproduction on

a glass plate were dyed with aniline.23 Fueling the paint industry, aniline dyes found

their way into the production of artists’ supplies as well. The industrial boomtown of

Rochester counted a fair number of artists’ supply stores in addition to its textiles and

paint industries.24 The Genesee Paint and Color Works, for instance, had the second

largest artists’ materials stock in the state in the 1890s, after New York City.25 At the

same time, Rochester became a prime location for the emerging photographic industry,

prominently marked by the founding of the Eastman Company in 1889 (Eastman Kodak

Company since 1892), in the wake of which a great number of photographic supply stores

joined those for paint and artists’ materials.26 This local convergence of dyes, artists’

paints, and photography provided an ideal material, cultural, and economic environment

for Nicholson to develop and launch his photographic colors.27 A Tokyo business

or production location is not apparent from this context, leaving the question of the

Japanese status of the colorants themselves an open matter.

The early editions of Nicholson’s manual give no information about composition

or production, merely stressing that the manufacture of the film of “concentrated soluble

color” is “prepared by a process known only to ourselves.”28 The 1928 edition contains

an extensive warning against cheap imitations, most certainly directed against the Velox

Transparent Water Color Stamps, which Eastman Kodak had brought to the market in

1914 and which mimicked Nicholson’s colors in every respect but added perforation

marks that facilitated tearing of equal portions of paint matter.29 In Nicholson’s 1928

edition, “Tokio, Japan” has disappeared from the title page and “made in U.S.A.” is

printed on the back cover.

A 1934 handbook for hand coloring photographs recommends Nicholson’s

Peerless Japanese Water-Colors and Eastman Kodak’s rival Velox colors as the two

leading aniline dye–based photo-coloring supplies, both for their easy and smooth

application.30 Preliminary tests carried out by the Getty Conservation Institute on a

1928 edition of Nicholson’s colors confirm the synthetic origin of a number of colors.31 In

fact, shortly after their development, aniline dyes had been identified as ideal colorants

for albumen photographs due to their transparent shine and their affinity with the

egg white–coated surface of the albumen photograph, on which they blended easily,

rendering prior preparation of the photographic paper unnecessary.32 Henry Snelling had

anticipated something like aniline in his 1849 handbook, confident that “some compound

or ingredient may yet be discovered which [. . .] will give a more delicate, pleasing, and

natural appearance to the picture than is derived from the present mode of laying them

on, which in estimation is more like plastering than coloring.”33 It is difficult to pinpoint

the exact date for the first commercial sale of aniline dyes for coloring photographs,

but in a 1859 photo-coloring manual published by London’s paint and photographic




supply manufacturer James Newman, Newman’s Photographic Colors are advertised

as “prepared by a peculiar process” that makes them adhere easily while they “colour

without hiding the photograph, giving a pure, brilliant and life-like effect.”34 A handbook

that appeared seven years later recommended that “liquid colors, that is, the new Aniline

colors are specially adapted for the tinting and coloring of albumen pictures; these colors

flow very easily and the albumen surface requires no preparation,” and specified the

colors manufactured by Newman.35 Somewhere in between, the use of aniline dyes for

coloring photographs became a fact. Initially prone to fading, the dyes were constantly

improved upon, and many new compounds were developed over the following decades,

making a large spectrum of dyes available for Nicholson to use in formulating his colors.36

Given the technical and historical circumstantial evidence, it can be safely

concluded that Nicholson’s colors were not Japanese, in either origin or composition,

and that the reasons for labeling them as such must be sought elsewhere. To find out, we

have to return once again to the manual’s opening statement that the “art of transparent

tinting had its origin in Japan and the wonderful skill of the Japanese artists in this line

of work has excited universal admiration.”37 This vague allusion becomes more palpable

when the launch of Nicholson’s colors is related to one of the largest and most expensive

American book projects, undertaken a couple years earlier and still ongoing in 1902: the

ten-volume Captain Brinkley’s Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, published

by the J. B. Millet Company in Boston.38 A pinnacle of the American fascination with

Japan, which had opened its borders in 1868, the collection was written by Western

specialists in dialogue with Japanese historians, and each volume was bound in gilt

fabric and lavishly furnished with original Japanese artworks, collotypes of flowers,

and hand-colored and black-and-white photographs of Japanese customs, landscapes,

and artworks.39 Between 1897 and 1904, at least sixteen different editions were issued

in limited print runs ranging from 25 to 1,000 copies, adding up to 37,750 individual

volumes. Depending on the edition, each copy was furnished with 30 to 60 full-page

hand-colored albumen photographs and 200 smaller photographs throughout the

text, amounting to at least 405,500 photographs colored by hand over a period of seven

years.40 Such hand-colored photographs had first seen the light in Yokohama at the

beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912) and were initially manufactured by European

photographers in collaboration with Japanese colorists and later produced in Japanese

photography studios as well. Extremely popular among tourists and sojourners, these

so-called “Yokohama shashin” (Yokohama photographs), which showcased famous

Japanese views and typical customs, had initially returned to the United States in

tourists’ private photo albums.41 Brinkley’s Japan made them available to everyone who

could afford them, without having to travel to the Far East. To guarantee the customer

an authentic Japanese experience nonetheless, it was absolutely vital that all materials

used in the production of Brinkley’s Japan were truly Japanese, a fact extensively

stressed in a sales prospectus and the introduction in the first volume.42 Concerning

the photographs, the introduction specifies that they “are all made and colored by hand




Fig. 6. A Japanese Artist at Work, hand-colored albumen photograph, image: 13.5 × 8.9 cm (5 5⁄16 ×

3 1⁄2 in.). From Captain F. Brinkley, ed., Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, Edition de Luxe,

vol. 1 (Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1897–98), vi. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum (84.xb.878.1.1)




in Japan, over three hundred and fifty native artists have been specially engaged for

this purpose,” and for visual support, a hand-colored photograph of a Japanese colorist

at work is placed right next to the text (fig. 6).43 This, then, must have been the “art of

transparent tinting” that Nicholson alluded to in his booklet.

Yet the connection between Nicholson’s colors and Brinkley’s Japan goes beyond

the opportune association of a new product with these highly successful, fashionable, and

abundantly produced pictures. A 1904 advertisement for Peerless Japanese Transparent

Water Colors in the photo magazine Camera Craft again stresses — like the booklet

itself — the “beautiful handiwork of Japanese artists in coloring photographs,” but adds

a significant piece of new information: “it is not generally known that most of the work is

now done in this country and the only medium used is the Japanese Transparent Water

Colors.” The text further promises that the amateur will be able to equal the work of the

Japanese artists and even earn money in doing so. In addition, it advertises “color tinting

of every description” carried out at the “Japanese studio” at the New York branch of the

Japanese Water Color Company, the address of which corresponds with that on the title

page of the booklet (see fig. 3).44

What are we to make of Nicholson’s claim that the Japanese photographs were

not all colored in Japan? In fact, despite their material Japaneseness assured by the

publisher, the Brinkley editions were assembled in Boston (the more expensive ones

on subscription only).45 It would have made a lot of sense for the Millet Company to

eventually contract for the coloring with a place nearby rather than having to order a

new batch of hand-colored photographs all the way from Yokohama whenever they were

needed for the next volumes at hand. An involvement with the coloring of the Brinkley

photos would explain not only the Boston address in the booklet but also why Nicholson

marketed his colors with a distinct yet somewhat untraceable Japanese identity,

so as to profit from the association while not compromising the Millet Company’s

claim that coloring took place in Japan. Supporting the likely business relation with

Millet, Nicholson’s how-to instructions betray an intimate knowledge of the Japanese

coloring craft, which differed from Western approaches in one particular aspect.

While Western photo-coloring manuals would advise the equal coloring of all picture

elements, giving directions on how to color the face, hands, and hair and then moving

on to clothing, landscape, and other requisites — just like painters’ manuals had done

for centuries — Nicholson writes: “when objects in the picture are printed in a natural

color, as, for instance, the bark of trees, an old fence, or a weather-beaten building, put

no color on whatever.” 46 Indeed, the subtle, pleasing aesthetic of Japanese hand-colored

photographs is due to a selective form of coloring that highlights some picture elements

and leaves out others. This principle, which can be traced back to Japanese woodblock

prints, is nicely demonstrated by the colorist depicted in Brinkley’s Japan: the paint in

his porcelain dishes is red, blue, pink, and green, but his face and hands, the screens

in the back and — as if to emphasize their transformation from black-and-white into

color — also the photos on his desk have remained untouched (see fig. 6). Contrary to




what the term suggests, selectiveness therefore achieves a pictorial unity by leaving

some colors to the imagination or rather the visual experience of the viewer, who knows

that skin is generally skin colored, stones gray, the bark of trees brown, and skies blue

(relying on what cognitive psychology refers to as “memory color”),47 while other colors

which cannot be deduced from visual experience, such as the colors of garments, are

filled in. The partial absence of color is also important with regard to a question that

may arise about the accuracy of hand coloring: did those colors represent the actual

colors of the scenes of Japanese life recorded in the photographs? An advertisement by

the Yokohama-based photographer Adolfo Farsari in an 1890 tourist guide claims that

not only was his studio’s coloring artistically superior to that of Japanese studios, but

“the colors were carefully noted at the time that the photographs of temples and other

structures were taken, and we are the only ones who paint them as they really are.”48 Yet

it was exactly such structures of stone and wood that typically remained untouched in

the photos. Farsari’s claim therefore attests less to actual coloring practice than to the

indexical claim of photography and the imminent reproduction of color, which by the

1890s had moved considerably closer on the horizon of expectations. In hand tinting

rather than reproducing what had been there, the authenticity of color resided in the

transparency of the aniline dyes that allowed for the objects in the picture to remain

visible underneath the film of colorant. And paradoxically, the authenticity of color in

the Yokohama photographs was also supported by its very absence in particular picture

elements, creating what could be described as an “ultimate transparency” of color.

Nicholson’s peerless, Japanese, transparent colors paved the way for Japanese

style photo coloring in the West, not only regarding materials and aesthetics, but

also practices: the advertisement of 1904 implied that the achievement of this “art of

transparent tinting” was no longer restricted to Japanese artists alone but, with the help

of Nicholson’s colors, was attainable for American amateurs as well. The manual’s “No. 4

Flesh Tint” attests to the different pictorial and cultural conventions the colors bridged:

while in Japanese photographs, human skin was treated just like the bark of trees or an

old fence and remained uncolored except maybe for a slight blush on cheeks and lips,

in Western pictorial tradition the color of the flesh was considered the most important

of all and, at the same time, the most difficult to re-create (figs. 7, 8).49 This also applied

to the craft of photo coloring, and its how-to manuals would inevitably start out with

instructions on the coloring of faces, describing in great detail the various mixtures and

grades of shading necessary to depict the skin of different sexes and ages. For instance,

Snelling’s instructions on how to paint a face list no less than nine different pigments,

applied in different combinations and intensities.50 For Nicholson’s colors to succeed

in an American market beyond the craze for Japanese hand-colored photographs, the

inclusion of “No. 4 Flesh Tint” was paramount. Yet his instructions read as a compromise

between the absence of flesh color in the Japanese tradition and its excessive application

in the West, as Nicholson urgently warns the user to dilute the colors properly and to use

a “weak wash” and little shading (see fig. 7). The application of aniline-based colors in a




Figs. 7, 8. Instructions and color material of “No. 4 Flesh Tint.” From Charles F. Nicholson,

Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors (Boston, New York, and Tokyo: Japanese Water-Color Co.,

1902), paper and colorant, each page: 20 × 8 cm (8 7⁄8 × 3 1⁄4 in.). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute

(86-b26647)




“weak” manner also demonstrates that coloring materials are not intrinsically cultured

but only become so in their diverse applications: the synthetic dyes, which have often

been characterized as loud, garish, and therefore essentially “modern” colors, could also

be used in a watered-down fashion to create an “authentically” Japanese impression.

A small testimony to a fascinating transcultural chapter in the history of hand

coloring photographs, Nicholson’s Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors therefore

reveals the meaningful relations between actual materials, artistic practices, and cultural

attributions. Nicholson’s colors were made Japanese not by substance or origin but

rather through the practices and ensuing aesthetics with which they could be associated.

With regard to the separation between hand coloring and the reproduction of

color in histories of early photography that I mentioned in the beginning of this article,

the investigation of Nicholson’s colors has shown how hand coloring, and in particular

the paradigm of transparency and its contingent aniline medium, worked toward a con-

vincing representation of color that anticipated its mechanical reproduction. Such a con-

vincing representation was not necessarily achieved through an accurate transcription

of color from the scene in front of the camera to the photograph but by approximating a

“natural” perception of color. Had François Arago known the transparent dyes and their

effective partial applications in Japanese photographs, he may have thought differently

about hand-painted butterfly wings. Taking up his metaphor one last time, it seems that

when it came to color, photographs were indeed not entirely unlike butterfly wings. The

latter are colored by a combination of two different phenomena: intricate patterns of

scales that reflect light to cause so-called structural color and actual pigmentation of

the wing surface.51 Similarly, photographs assumed color through different phenomena,

materials, and procedures, which should be studied in conjunction, not in opposition.

Ann-Sophie Lehmann holds the chair of modern and contemporary art history at the Univer-

sity of Groningen, The Netherlands, where her research investigates how materials, tools, and

practices shape visual artifacts and their ensuing meanings and uses.

Notes This article results from research carried out during my Getty scholarship in 2013. I would

like to thank Jan von Brevern, Vanessa Schwartz, and Aleca Le Blanc for their valuable comments and

Rebecca Zamora for helping me with the illustrations.

1. See, for instance, Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch, The Painted Photograph 1839–1914:

Origins, Techniques, Aspirations (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), chapter 1,

“Discovery and Disappointment,” 1–19; and Laura Claudet, “Coloring by Hand,” in John Hannavy, Ency-

clopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (New York: Routledge, 2008), 322.

2. Henisch and Henisch, Painted Photograph, 2–3. For a recent edition and commentary on the

early sources, see Steffen Siegel, ed., Neues Licht. Dokumente zur Veröffentlichung und Verbreitung der Foto-

grafie im Jahr 1839 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014).

3. Robert Hunt, A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, Including Daguerréotype, and All the

New Methods of Producing Pictures by the Chemical Agency of Light (Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., 1841).

Available online at ETH Bibliothek Zürich, RAR 1300. On other early color technologies see Bertrand

Lavédrine, Photographs of the Past: Process and Preservation (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009).




4. Hunt, Popular Treatise, 22.

5. Henry Hunt Snelling, The History and Practice of the Art of Photography; or, The Production of

Production of Pictures Through the Agency of Light (New York 1849), 27. From 1851 to 1860, Snelling pub-

lished the Photographic and Fine Arts Journal; see Hannavy, Encyclopedia, 731–32, 1083–84, 1279.

6. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2004), 275–76.

7. Snelling, History and Practice, 76.

8. See for instance J. Zeigler, “Coloring Daguerreotypes,” The Photographic Art-Journal 2 (1851):

109–11, whose instructions are preceded by a comparable disclaimer: “Sir, I have often laid before you the

opinion that heliographic impressions should neither be retouched [. . .] nor colored and yet you urgently

ask me for a few lines upon colors applied to heliography” (109). On French sources doubting the value of

hand coloring, see Lavédrine, Photographs of the Past, 30.

9. See John Tresch, “The Daguerreotype’s First Frame: François Arago’s Moral Economy of

Instruments,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38, no. 2 (2007): 445–76, here 468; and Claudet,

“Coloring by Hand,” 323.

10. Arago donated the collection to the Perpignan Museum of Natural History in the same year

that photography was patented; see J. Brémond, “Les papillons de la collection Dominique François Arago

(1786–1853) du museum de Perpignan,” Conflent 161, no. 5 (1989): 17–51.


12. Zeigler, “Coloring Daguerreotypes,” 110.

13. Claudet, Coloring, 322–24.

14. The phrase is used in a review of the English translation of Daguerre’s treatise in 1839, adding

that by means of the camera we have got “a drawing of nature, but still desiderate a painting”, N., “Electro-

type and Daguerreotype,” The London and Westminster Review, vols. 33–34 (1840): 215–28, here 223.

15. Henisch and Henisch, Painted Photograph, 38–39 and 99–100, list more than thirty manuals

and instructional texts in journals in English, German, and French. See Hannavy, Encyclopedia, 177–87, for

an annotated overview of photographic handbooks from 1840 to 1900. Snelling himself worked for one of

the major manufacturers and suppliers of photography materials in the United States, Edward Anthony,

to whom his treatise is dedicated and whose products are recommended throughout.

16. Charles F. Nicholson, Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors (New York, Boston, and

Tokyo: Japanese Water-Color Co., 1902), title page.

17. See, for instance, S. R. Lock, “Colored Photographs,” The Photographic and Fine Art Journal,

April 1855, 111 (cited in Henisch and Henisch, Painted Photograph, 59): “By long experience I am convinced

that the use of transparent colors — not of powder, chalks or oil — is alone conducive to the proper object

in view.”

18. Nicholson, Peerless Japanese Transparent Water-Colors, n.p.

19. The Rochester Directory, vol. 30 (Rochester, N.Y.: Sampson & Murdock Company, 1879), 278;

The Rochester Directory, vol. 22 (Rochester, N.Y.: Sampson & Murdock Company, 1871), 189.

20. I. J. Isaacs, The Industrial Advance of Rochester: A Historical, Statistical & Descriptive Review

(Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1884), 96–97. The dyes are mentioned in William B. Dick,

Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts and Processes (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1872), 243, recipe no. 2606.

English dyers played a key role in the development of synthetic dyes; see W. Johnston, “The Discovery of

Aniline and the Origin of the Term ‘Aniline Dye,’ ” Biotechnic and Histochemistry 83, no. 2 (2008): 83–87.

21. See Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds—Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion

Books, 2005).

22. Laura Anne Kalba, “Blue Roses and Yellow Violets: Flowers and the Cultivation of Color in

Nineteenth-Century France,” Representations 120, no. 1 (2012): 83–114.




23. Lavédrine, Photographs of the Past, 77.

24. Stores are listed in the Illustrated History of the Rochester Trades Assembly and the Building

Trades Council (Rochester, N.Y.: Boyd Press, 1897), 38 and 166.

25. The Rochester Directory, vol. 30 (1879), 600; and Caspar’s Directory of the American Book, News

and Stationery Trade, Wholesale and Retail (Milwaukee: C. N. Caspar, 1889), 1225. Another large manufac-

turer was the Huntington Brothers, see The Rochester Directory, vol. 30 (1879), 3, 198.; and listed with a

different owner in The Industries of the City of Rochester: A Résumé of Her Past History and Progress etc. (Roch-

ester, N.Y.: Elstner Publishing Company, 1888), 250.

26. See, for instance, the listings in Illustrated History, 73, 79, 105, and 109.

27. The colors are registered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office as IC 002. US

006 011 016. G & S: Watercolor paints, with the addition “first use in commerce 1885,” http://tmsearch

.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:3rexrv.3.1. The copyright was renewed in 1908 (Catalogue

of Copyright Entries: Books, Dramatic Compositions, Maps and Charts, vol. 5 [Washington, D.C.: Library of

Congress, 1908], 128), in 1909 (Catalog of Copyright Entries: Musical Compositions, part 1, vol. 7 [1909],

217), in 1916 (Catalog of Copyright Entries, New Series, vol. 13, no. 9 [1916], 1651), and again in 1923 and 1928,

when the title is changed to include Nicholson’s name. In 1932 the colors are renamed “Nicholson’s self-

blending non-poisonous water colors” (Catalog of Copyright Entries, Part 1. [B] Group 2. Pamphlets, Etc.

New Series [1932], 804). The colors are still produced today in Rochester.


29. Charles F. Nicholson, Nicholson’s Peerless Japanese Transparent Water Colors (Rochester, N.Y.,

1928), 2-4. The Velox colors are advertised in Kodaks and Kodak Supplies (Toronto: Canadian Kodak Com-

pany, 1914), 42. Competing ads for both products in The Amateur Photographer’s Weekly 4/86 (February

1914), 250 and 262.

30. J. Carroll Tobias, The Art of Coloring Photographic Prints: In Transparent Watercolor, Tempera,

Opaque and Transparent Pastel, Wax Crayons, Opaque and Transparent Oils, Chemical Coloring, and Coloring

Lantern Slides (Boston: American Photographic Pub. Co., 1934), 30.

31. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) on a sample of the “Brilliant Yellow” related

the spectrum to five synthetic color and ink samples in the Getty Coloring Material Database. Raman

Spectroscopy on all colors again related the spectra of the “Brilliant Yellow” to yellow monoazo dye. Micro

fading tests showed that all colors are light sensitive in similar ways as synthetic dyes. I am grateful to

Dusan Stulik, Catherine Patterson, and Vincent Beltran of the Getty Conservation Institute for support-

ing my research.

32. See, for instance, A. Urquhart, “Transparent Colors for Photography,” The American Journal

for Photography (December 1864): 246–47, cited in Henisch and Henisch, Painted Photograph, 65 and 76.


34. [Anonymous], The Principles and Practice of Harmonious Colouring in Oil, Water and Photo-

graphic Colours, Especially as Applied to Photographs on Paper, Glass and Silverplate, by an artist-photographer

(London: W. Kent & Co; James Newman, 1859). The book is attributed to the French miniaturist Andre

Leon Larue, alias Mension; see Claudet, “Coloring,” 323.

35. John Towler, The Silver Sunbeam: A Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on Sun Drawing etc.

(London, 1866), 224. The book also contains an ad for Dr. E. Jacobson’s New Aniline Colors for painting

albumen prints on 464. The German chemist also published “On the Employment of Aniline Colors in

Coloring Albumen Photographs,” The American Journal of Photography (March 1865): 440–44. For the

United States, Dusan Stulik has counted no less than twenty-seven patents for photo-coloring materials

for the period between 1842 and 1880.

36. See, for instance, Dr. Emil Jacobson’s Chemisch-Technisches Repertorium, vol. 38 (Berlin:

Gaertner’s Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1899–1900), which gives detailed recipes and formulas for hundreds of




synthetic colorants and lists many more commercially available ones, for instance a water-soluble, yellow

monoazo dye on page 20, like the one identified in Nicholson’s “Brilliant Yellow” (see note 31).


38. Denise Bethel, “The J. B. Millet Company’s Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese,”

Image 34 (1991): 3–21; and Elmer Funkhouser, “Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese,” Arts of

Asia 29, no. 2 (1999): 133–38. Josiah B. Millet’s publishing house specialized in sheet music and art books.

39. The Getty Research Institute holds a copy of the Memorial Edition; the J. Paul Getty Museum

holds number 136 of the Edition de Luxe of 750.

40. Bethel, “The J. B. Millet Company’s Japan,” 9 and appendix A.

41. For a concise yet nuanced overview, see Philip Ono, Unknown Japan: Reconsidering 19th-

Century Photographs (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2008). See also Anne Lacoste, Felice Beato: A Photogra-

pher on the Eastern Road (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010); and Eleanor M. Hight, Capturing Japan

in Nineteenth-Century New England Collections (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

42. Bethel, “The J. B. Millet Company’s Japan,” 4.

43. Arthur J. Mundy, “Introduction,” in Captain F. Brinkley, ed., Japan: Described and Illustrated

by the Japanese (Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1897–98), vi–vii. The photographers have been identified

as Tamamura Kozaburo, Kusakabe Kimbei, and T. Enami, who all had their studios on Benten Street,

Yokohama; see Sebastian Dobson, “Yokohama Shashin,” in Sebastian Dobson, Anne Nishimura Morse,

and Frederic Alan Sharf, Art and Artifice: Japanese Photographs of the Meiji Era: Selections from the Jean S.

and Frederic A. Sharf Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston: MFA Publications, 2004); for

T. Enami’s contribution, see Robert Oechsle on Tenami.org.

44. The advertisement appears on 339. A similar ad appears together with an article that sum-

marizes the booklet’s text by C. F. Nicholson in Camera Magazine: An Illustrated Magazine Devoted to the

Advancement of Photography 10 (1906): 52–53. In 1904, Down Town Photographic Topics, edited by the Obrig

Camera Company, announced a demonstration of Japanese Transparent Water Colors, asking the reader to

“bring a print and have it tinted with these new Japanese colors” on Monday, Dec. 5th, from 10 am to 5 pm,

165–67 Broadway (Down Town Photographic Topics 3, no. 5 [1904]).

45. Bethel, “The J. B. Millet Company’s Japan,” 4. The edition in the Fine Arts Library at Harvard

University, for instance, was assembled for Alexander S. Porter, a prominent Boston real estate agent,

http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/epj/japan_described_illustrated.cfm.


47. See Peter Bodrogi and Tünde Tarczali, “Colour Memory for Various Sky, Skin, and Plant Col-

ours: Effect of the Image Context,” Color Research and Application 26, no. 4 (2001): 278–89.

48. Advertisement by A. Farsari in Keeling’s Guide to Japan, Yokohama, Tokio, Hakone, Fujiyama,

Kamakura, Yokoska, Kanozan, Narita, Nikko, Kioto, Osaka, Kobe &c., &c., Together with Useful Hints, History,

Customs, Festivals Roads &c., &c., with Ten Maps, 4th ed., rev. and enlarged by A. Farsari (Yokohama: A. Far-

sari for sale by Kelly & Walsh Limited, 1890).

49. See Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “Fleshing Out the Body: The Colours of the Naked in Dutch Art

Theory and Workshop Practice 1400–1600,” Body and Embodiment in Netherlandish Art, Netherlands Year-

book for History of Art 58 (Zwolle: Wanders 2008), 108–31.

50. Snelling, History and Practice, 131; for a typical recipe, see also [Anonymous], The Principles

and Practice of Harmonious Colouring, “To Paint the Head,” 41–48.

51. Marco Antonio Giraldo, “Butterfly Wing Scales: Pigmentation and Structural Properties,”

Ph.D. diss. (Groningen: Rijkuniversiteit Groningen 2008), http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/304871559.



The Transparency of Color: Aesthetics, Materials, and Practices of Hand Coloring Photographs between...

Documents

Transcript of The Transparency of Color: Aesthetics, Materials, and Practices of Hand Coloring Photographs between...