Castle of Chillon, Near View, Dent du Midi and Upper End of Lake Geneva,

1821

In 1807, decades before the announcement of photography’s invention in 1839, the chemist William Hyde Wollaston patented the camera lucida, an optical device that superimposes an image of the object(s) before it onto paper or canvas, allowing the outline of the image to be easily traced. Wollaston created the camera lucida to produce accurate geological renderings, but its ability to capture images with fidelity and relative ease proved useful to artists, draftspeople, and researchers in fields that required illustrations, such as botany. Herschel, the English polymath and early photographic inventor responsible for coining the term “photography,” used the camera lucida to make this detailed sketch during an 1821 journey through France, Switzerland, and northern Italy.