Sir John Herschel and cyanotypes

How is it that the Polymath and inventor of the cyanotype process, Sir John Herschel, appears to have left no cyanotype images? This startling image  by Julia Margaret Cameron records the man, and in a way pays testament to the contribution he made to Photography.

Sir John Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron

After much searching, I found this image referenced in an interview with artist Sarah Harper – an early print/paper negative – not a cyanotype.  A haunting view of his father’s telescope – almost like a hangman’s scaffold.

Herschel discovered the cyanotype process in 1842 – in two years of wide experimentation with plants from his gardens and other vegetation, he was constantly looking for a way to use light sensitive materials to capture colour images.  Dr Alfred Smee directed Herschel to potassium ferricyanide which he combined with ferric ammonium citrate.  The resulting solution when exposed to sunlight, specifically UV light, forms ferric ferricyanide or the insoluble Prussian Blue.

My assumption is that Herschel then used it to record his notes, but a reading of Christopher James (James, C. 2007) suggests that it was not until the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 that the process was fully industrialised and the practice of creating ‘blueprint’ drawings by engineers became the standard for the next century.  Anne Atkins might have learnt the process from Herschel, and her immediate use of the cyanotype process in 1843 was, like Herschel’s, rooted in the scientific method, recording images of seaweeds and algae with classification notes in her own precise writing.

This link of the astronomical, the scientific method, and recording in word as well as image is a link to explore.

James, D (2007) ‘The Book of Alternative Photography Processes’, New York: Delmar.

Below Herschel’s notes in his own hand, diagrams and a drawing of a cloud nebula from Science photo library – all on paper rather than through the medium of cyanotypes…..are any John Herschel original cyanotypes still in existence?

Herschel’s observations of galaxies. At the time of these observations, these objects were considered to be within our galaxy. When more powerful telescopes were used in the early 20th century, it was realised that some of the ‘nebulae’ contained stars and were much more distant objects, now called galaxies. This collection of 17 separate observations was published as Plate IV in Volume II of the Collected Papers of the German-born British astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822).

Keyhole Nebula. Artwork of the Keyhole Nebula by the British astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), published in ^IResults of Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope^i (1847). Herschel’s observations in South Africa were made between 1834 and 1838. The Keyhole Nebula, named as such by Herschel, is a cloud of gas and dust that is part of the much larger Carina Nebula. It consists of filaments of glowing gas and dust against a background of cold and dark gas and dust. These nebulae are around 7500 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Carina.