Currently not on view
Asplenium Braziliense, South America,
1854
Anna Atkins, British, 1799–1871
x1990-55
Atkins’s images are all cyanotype photograms (cameraless photographs) created by pressing a plant sample and its handwritten label against a sheet of sensitized paper and then exposing it to sunlight. When the shape of the plant became visible on the paper, the green-tinted sheet was rinsed, washing away unexposed iron salts and turning the exposed area a rich blue. Atkins was an unusually well-connected scientist: her father chaired the February 1839 Royal Society meeting at which the British inventor and photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot made his "photogenic drawings" public, and she learned the cyanotype (blueprint) process directly from its inventor, John Herschel. Atkins began making albums of botanical studies in 1843, becoming the first to use photographs for taxonomic purposes.e
Information
Title
Asplenium Braziliense, South America
Dates
1854
Maker
Medium
Cyanotype
Dimensions
34.6 × 24.5 cm (13 5/8 × 9 5/8 in.)
mount: 48.3 × 37.5 cm (19 × 14 3/4 in.)
mat: 50.8 × 40.6 cm (20 × 16 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase, anonymous gift
Object Number
x1990-55
Place Made
Europe, England
Inscription
In graphite, upper right: 40
In graphite, bottom right: AAt 148Y
Reference Numbers
Schaaf 44
Culture
Type
Techniques
Subject
- Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens Victorian Photograms by Anne Atkins (New York: Aperture Press, 1985)., pp. 35–36, plate 44 (illus.)
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1990," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 50, no. 1 (1991): p. 16-69., pp. 54–55 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 112 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 38
