Within the framework of the PHotoEspaña Festival, the Museo del Prado, in collaboration with the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (Madrid) and the National Media Museum (Bradford, England), will present the exhibition entitled “Copied by the Sun”. In addition to seven of the examples taken from the illustrated volume of the Annals, for the first time this exhibition will bring together the various materials that Stirling employed in creating the book, as well as information regarding the background events surrounding the project, workshop proofs of the talbotypes and models that were used to create the images (sculptures, drawings, engravings and books). The project will be completed with two volumes co-published by Museo del Prado and Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, one featuring studies and a catalogue raisonné of the photographs that make up Stirling’s book, and another volume that recreates an ideal facsimile of the Talbotype Illustrations, one that has been digitally constructed in order to provide an idea of what the book may have been like when it was produced and before the illustrations began to fade.

Annals of the Artists of Spain was the first book in the history of Spanish art that was organised chronologically and the first in the world to include photographs. It was published by the English collector and Hispanist, William Stirling Maxwell. The work was conceived in four volumes. The first three, featuring texts by Stirling Maxwell, were published in 1848, whilst the fourth was a supplement of illustrations made for Stirling’s friends and collaborators, of which only 50 copies were published for friends, family members, collaborators, collectors and libraries. Of these, only 25 remain, all revealing different degrees of deterioration, featuring more or less serious fading at the edges due to chemical or environmental factors. The causes of this are linked to the early date of the photographs, which were produced at a time when the photographic procedures of negative and copy were still being developed and had yet to reach the appropriate degree of stability. This is why the exhibition of these items today is subject to strict conditions of light, temperature and humidity.

With this book Spanish art achieved a certain degree of awareness abroad, given that works by sixteenth and seventeenth century artists were reproduced, in addition to works by Goya. It brought together a total of sixty-eight photographs created by the photographer, Nicolaas Henneman, under Stirling’s supervision.

The purpose of this exhibition, which has enjoyed the collaboration of the National Media Museum in Bradford, where all of the proofs corresponding to the work from Henneman’s workshop are preserved (proofs which document the technical process followed in its creation), is to explain how the book was made.

The photographic process employed for the book was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), which is why the negatives on paper were given the name of “talbotypes”. Nicolaas Henneman (1813-98), Talbot’s assistant, founded an establishment where the first photographs were produced using this technique, whose limitations determined the way the book was made. The sensitivity of the negatives to light was quite low, which is why the shots were taken outside. The exposure time was somewhat prolonged due to the low sensitivity of the paper. Furthermore, this varied according to the light conditions, increasing on cloudy days, although really sunny days were avoided in order to prevent glare. The copies were also made under the light of the sun, with the paper negative being placed in contact with the paper covered in a positive emulsion. The unstable nature of this new technique, based on the manual preparation of the paper with chemical products, meant that deficiencies were observed during the process of obtaining negatives and copies which affected their preservation.

With this book Stirling sought to use this new photographic technique to place a new tool at the service of the history of art. In this sense, he replaced engravings and lithographs with photographs, which enabled him to reproduce the works in a simpler manner. However, the need to take photos under the light of the sun prevented him from portraying the originals that were located inside Spain’s museums and churches. For this reason, on numerous occasions Stirling was forced to turn to engravings and lithographs that reproduced the works of art, reproductions that formed part of his collection and his library, using them as a model. In other cases, Stirling contracted artists in Seville and Paris to produce oil or watercolour copies of the works that interested him and that had never been reproduced before, which were subsequently photographed. On exceptional occasions he was able to reproduce the originals, these always being works of small size – relief works, drawings, books and prints – which were transported to Henneman’s workshop from the collection belonging to his friend, the writer and traveller throughout Spain, Richard Ford (1796-58).

Publications

In order to mark this exhibition, Museo del Prado and Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica have co-published two volumes: one recreates an ideal facsimile of the Talbotype Illustrations, which have been digitally constructed in order to provide an idea of what the book may have been like when it was produced and before the illustrations began to fade; the other is an exhaustive catalogue raisonné of this volume, which is completed with six preliminary studies that explain why and how it was made, why photography was used as a medium for illustrating the works of art, and an outline of the problems that were inherent in this (at that time) new technique. These studies were produced by Hilary Macartney, José Manuel Matilla, Larry J. Schaaf and Jim Tate, who enjoyed the collaboration of Davis Weston, Brian Liddy, Maureen Young, Colin Hardind and Beatriz Naranjo.