ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY The First Exhibition.—The holding of the first recorded ex hibition of photographers at the Gallery of the Society of Arts in December of that year gave an additional impetus and in January 1853 the Photographic Society of London came into being. Other societies quickly followed and photographers multi plied. At the first meeting of the London Society, one of the Vice Presidents, Sir William Newton R.A., a distinguished artist, read a paper in which he put forward several ideas that countered the false standard of pictorialism accepted as the result of its practice by those whose only qualifications were scientific.
The most admired features of a picture at that time, we read, were sharp definition all over and a blank expanse of pure white for the sky. Sir William made two suggestions that were a direct attack upon the existing position. One was that the pic torialist should aim at a broad and general effect for which end it was not necessary that the whole of the picture should be in sharp focus. The other was that artificial means should be adopted to obtain some suggestion of a sky, either by local reduction or by dabbing pigment on the back of the negative to simulate clouds. These rather ruffled the photographers but the leaven worked and by 1862 there was general agreement on the desirability of adding skies to pictures since it was then impossible to secure them on the same plate as the landscape. Already in 1856 a print 'Royal Photographic Society of Gt. Britain.
of a marine subject by a Frenchman named Le Gray exhibited at the Photographic Society's soirée at King's College had created a sensation and helped to break down the blank-sky convention. Composites.—The next phase that developed naturally from the prevailing conditions was the production of composite pic tures built up from two or more negatives. A method of doing this had been suggested as early as 1848 but the earliest exhibited example known was by Berwick and Annan in 1855 in which a figure had been introduced into a landscape. The first and most famous picture of this kind, of which we to-day have any knowl edge, was "The Two Ways of Life" (R.P.S. collection). This in teresting picture is a large print measuring 31x16 inches and built up from more than thirty separate negatives, by 0. G. Rejlander,
a Swede practising as a photographer at Wolverhampton. This remains the most ambitious attempt of its kind. Rejlander sent it to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 where the original was bought for Queen Victoria. A second copy was pur chased by Sir David Brewster who writes that he paid ten guineas for it, and a third copy, now at the R.P.S., was retained by Rejlander himself until 1870. There is no record of his making further use of the composite method although he worked for another twenty years, and all his other pictorial work is mainly in the class of domestic genre in which only one or two figures are used.
His example, however, stimulated Henry Peach Robinson (born at Ludlow in 183o), a young professional photographer at Leam ington, to employ his leisure time in attempting similar methods of picture making. He had had some artistic training; he had carved one of the statues of the reredos of Ludlow church and one of his paintings was accepted by the Royal Academy before he was twenty-one. He started life in the bookselling business at Ludlow, Bromsgrove and London and whilst at Bromsgrove in 185o learnt the daguerreotype process and subsequently Calo type and Collodion in preparation for a photographic career. His earliest pictorial attempts are unknown with the exception of the small "Juliet with the poison bottle" (R.P.S. collection) but in 1858 he produced a picture, entitled "Fading away," from five negatives which was first shown at the Crystal Palace and after wards at Leeds. It excited a violent controversy on the permissi bility of exhibiting so painful a subject (a girl dying from con sumption) to the public gaze. Robinson's fame was thenceforward established and for the next thirty years he was the leader of British photography. His style was essentially Victorian, artisti cally sound but anecdotic. The principal idea was to make the picture tell a story. His three finest works "The Day's work done" (1877) "Dawn and Sunset" (1885) and "Carolling" (1887) are now preserved in the R.P.S. collection. The two former are magnificent examples of albumen printing, measuring 3ox21 inches.