The Photochrom photographic process was developed in Zürich, Switzerland in the 1880s by the printing firm Orell Füssli (apparently still in business as a producer of “highly secure banknotes” and “identity documents” — see link). The famous Detroit Publishing Company (née Detroit Photographic Company) purchased exclusive American rights to the process in 1897, which was …
Category Archives: Res Obscura
Smokers and Drunkards in the Dutch Golden Age
I’ve recently been amassing an image library of paintings by the likes of Frans Hals, Adrian Brouwer, Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu and Jan Steen — Dutch painters who were contemporaries of Rembrandt and Vermeer and, though less well known, were in my view almost as good. I suspect that Vermeer’s popularity has given us a …
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Daily Life as a Slave
Below are some vivid paintings and engravings of enslaved peoples in the colonial Americas compiled by Professor Jerome S. Handler (his personal site) and Michael L. Tuite, Jr. in a joint project funded by the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Contextual details for these images are scarce, but the pictures …
Image of the Week: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
This painting, by an anonymous English artist, depicts in remarkable detail the Spanish Armada‘s confrontation with English vessels, probably at the momentous Battle of Gravelines. From Wikipedia: English losses stood at 50-100 dead and 400 wounded, and none of their ships had been sunk. But after the victory, typhus, dysentery and hunger killed many …
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The Baron and the ‘Savages’: Lahontan in North America
An early French edition of Lahontan’s travelogue. I’ve spent the last week in UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center reading a book that was once sensationally famous but has since fallen into obscurity: the Baron de Lahontan’s Nouveux Voyages dans L’Amerique Septentrionale, published in English as New Voyages to North America (London, 1703). After reading less …
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The Domestic Life of Alchemists
Philadelphia’s Chemical Heritage Foundation maintains a wonderful Flickr page of images relating to the history of chemistry, pharmacy and alchemy. While perusing their image banks, I came across this collection of 17th and 18th-century paintings of alchemists practicing their occult art — paintings which include some revealing glimpses into the private life of those who …
Thanks, Readers!
Having reached the milestone of 50,000 visitors today, I thought I’d write to say thank you to all who have read, commented on and shared this site. Its been rewarding for me to find that members of the general public are actually interested in the arcane oddities of historical research — the nature of the …
Cabinets of Curiosities in the Seventeenth Century
“There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him… There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us.”– Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1642 Early modern Europeans envisioned their own bodies as miniature worlds which echoed God’s Creation in every detail. And in the expansionist, acquisitive …
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The Baroque Monsters of Father Schott
In Portuguese, barroco means “imperfect pearl”: a fitting name for the Baroque era, a period that combined ornate beauty with a distinct taste for the odd, macabre and irregular. This interplay between the beautiful and the monstrous — and its connections to the rise of the “New Science” in the second half of the seventeenth …
Early Victorian Ambrotypes
I had never heard of the ambrotype (from the Greek for “immortal impression”) photographic process until quite recently, but it seems to have been a very popular medium in the middle decades of the nineteenth century — cheaper than the more famous daguerrotype, and with a level of pictorial detail and richness of tone that …
