Anna Atkins (née Children; 16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871
) was an English
botanist and
photographer
A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs.
Duties and types of photographers
As in other ...
. She is often considered the first person to publish a
book
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physi ...
illustrated with photographic images.
Some sources say that she was the first woman to create a photograph.
Early life
Atkins was born in Tonbridge
Tonbridge ( ) is a market town in Kent, England, on the River Medway, north of Royal Tunbridge Wells, south west of Maidstone and south east of London. In the administrative borough of Tonbridge and Malling, it had an estimated populat ...
, Kent, England in 1799.[ Her mother, Hester Anne Children, "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800.][ Anna was close to her father ]John George Children
John George Children FRS FRSE FLS PRES (18 May 1777 – 1 January 1852 in Halstead, Kent) was a British chemist, mineralogist and zoologist. He invented a method to extract silver from ore without the need for mercury. He was a friend of Sir ...
, a renowned chemist
A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe t ...
, mineralogist, and zoologist. Anna "received an unusually scientific education for a woman of her time." Her detailed engravings of shells were used to illustrate her father's translation of Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1 August 1744 – 18 December 1829), often known simply as Lamarck (; ), was a French naturalist, biologist, academic, and soldier. He was an early proponent of the idea that biolo ...
's ''Genera of Shells''.[
In 1825, she married John Pelly Atkins, a London West India merchant, later sheriff, and proponent of railways; during this same year, she moved to Halstead Place, the Atkins family home in ]Halstead
Halstead is a town and civil parish in the Braintree District of Essex, England. Its population of 11,906 in 2011[Sevenoaks
Sevenoaks is a town in Kent with a population of 29,506 situated south-east of London, England. Also classified as a civil parish, Sevenoaks is served by a commuter main line railway into London. Sevenoaks is from Charing Cross, the traditio ...]
, Kent.[ They had no children. Atkins pursued her interests in botany by collecting dried plants, which were probably used as photograms later.][ She was elected a member of the London Botanical Society in 1839.
]
Photography
John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Henry Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE Royal Astronomical Society, FRAS (; 11 February 180017 September 1877) was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the Salt print, salted paper and calotype processes, precursors t ...
.[ Anna Atkins learned directly from Talbot about two of his inventions related to photography: the "photogenic drawing" technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitized paper and exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotypes.
Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841.][ Some sources say that Atkins was the first female photographer,][ while others attribute this title to ]Constance Fox Talbot
Constance Talbot (née Mundy, 30 January 1811 – 9 September 1880) was an English artist credited as the first woman ever to take a photograph – a hazy image of a short verse by the Irish poet Thomas Moore.
Constance, who came from Markeato ...
. As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins,[ nor photographs by Constance Talbot,][ survive, the issue may never be resolved.
]
''Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions''
Sir John Herschel, a friend of Atkins and Children, invented the cyanotype
The cyanotype (from Ancient Greek κυάνεος - ''kuáneos'', “dark blue” + τύπος - ''túpos'', “mark, impression, type”) is a slow-reacting, economical photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet ...
photographic process in 1842.[ Within a year, Atkins applied the process to algae (specifically, seaweed) by making cyanotype ]photogram
A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light.
The usual result is a negative shadow image th ...
s that were contact print
A contact print is a photographic image produced from film; sometimes from a film negative, and sometimes from a film positive or paper negative. In a darkroom an exposed and developed piece of film or photographic paper is placed emulsion ...
ed[ "by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper".][
Atkins self-published her photograms in the first installment of ''Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions'' in October 1843.][ She planned to provide illustrations to ]William Henry Harvey
William Henry Harvey, FRS FLS (5 February 1811 – 15 May 1866) was an Irish botanist and phycologist who specialised in algae.
Biography
Harvey was born at Summerville near Limerick, Ireland, in 1811, the youngest of 11 children. His father ...
's ''A Manual of British Algae'' which had been published in 1841. Although privately published, with a limited number of copies, and with handwritten text, ''Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions'' is considered the first book illustrated with photographic images.[
Eight months later, in June 1844, the first fascicle of William Henry Fox Talbot's '' The Pencil of Nature'' was released; that book was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published" or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs".
Atkins produced a total of three volumes of ''Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions'' between 1843 and 1853.] Only 17 copies of the book are known to exist, in various states of completeness. Copies are now held by the following institutions, among others:[
* ]British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
, London, which provides scans of 429 pages of its copy (which has extra plates) online. She presented these volumes to the British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
via J. E. Gray
John Edward Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (12 February 1800 – 7 March 1875) was a British zoology, zoologist. He was the elder brother of zoologist George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray ...
between 1843 and 1853.
* Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a museum and art gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. It reopened in 2006 after a three-year refurbishment and since then has been one of Scotland's most popular visitor attractions. The museum has 22 galleries, h ...
, Glasgow, Scotland.
* Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
, New York.
* New York Public Library, which provides scans of 285 pages of its copy online.
* The Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
, London, whose copy with 403 pages and 389 plates is thought to be the only existing copy of the book as Atkins intended.[
* The ]Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
, London, holds a number of original works in their library.
* The Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is a learned society dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history, evolution, and taxonomy. It possesses several important biological specimen, manuscript and literature colle ...
, whose copy lacks part 7 of volume 1.
* The Horniman Museum and Gardens
The Horniman Museum and Gardens is a museum in Forest Hill, London, England. Commissioned in 1898, it opened in 1901 and was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend in the Modern Style. It has displays of anthropology, natural history and music ...
holds a particularly complete copy with 14 pages of text and 443 plates. She provided plates with additional images of the same species when she found a better example, and these duplicates have been retained in this copy.
* Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
* Université de Montréal
The Université de Montréal (UdeM; ; translates to University of Montreal) is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university's main campus is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Côte- ...
, Montreal
One copy of the book with 411 plates in three volumes sold for £133,500 at auction in 1996.[ Another copy with 382 prints in two volumes which was owned by scientist Robert Hunt (1807–1887) sold for £229,250 at auction in 2004.][
In 2018, the New York Public Library opened an exhibition on Atkins' life and work, featuring various versions of ''Photographs of British Algae''.
]
Later life and work
In addition to ''Photographs of British Algae'', Atkins published five fictional novels between 1852 and 1863. These included ''The Perils of Fashion'', ''Murder will Out: a story of real life'', and ''A Page from the Peerage''.
In the 1850s, Atkins collaborated with Anne Dixon (1799–1864), who was "like a sister" to her, to produce at least three presentation albums of cyanotype photograms:
* ''Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns'' (1853), now in the J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa.
The Getty Center is located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and fea ...
;
* ''Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns'' (1854), disassembled pages of which are held by various museums and collectors;
* An album inscribed to "Captain Henry Dixon," Anne Dixon's nephew (1861).
Atkins retained the algae, ferns and other plants that she used in her work and in 1865 donated the collection to the British Museum.
She died at Halstead Place in 1871 of "paralysis, rheumatism, and exhaustion" at the age of 72.[
]
In popular culture
On 16 March 2015, Internet search engine Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
commemorated Atkins's 216th birthday by placing a Google Doodle image of bluish leaf shapes on a darker background on its search page to represent her cyanoprint work.
Atkins' work was a major feature in the ''New Realities Photography in the Nineteenth Century'' exhibition held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, June – September 2017.
Publications
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See also
*Timeline of women in science
This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women f ...
References
Further reading
*
* Gerhard Bissell Gerhard is a name of Germanic origin and may refer to:
Given name
* Gerhard (bishop of Passau) (fl. 932–946), German prelate
* Gerhard III, Count of Holstein-Rendsburg (1292–1340), German prince, regent of Denmark
* Gerhard Barkhorn (1919–19 ...
''Atkins, Anna''
in: ''Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon
Thieme-Becker is a German biographical dictionary of artists.
Thieme-Becker
The dictionary was begun under the editorship of Ulrich Thieme (1865–1922) (volumes one to fifteen) and Felix Becker (1864–1928) (volumes one to four). It was complet ...
(Artists of the World)'', Suppl. I, Saur, Munich 2005, from p. 514 (in German).
*
*
External links
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*
*
Scans of ''Photographs of British algae: cyanotype impressions''
at New York Public Library (public domain). Retrieved 6 January 2016.
*Anna Atkins Collection Item
at Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Atkins, Anna
1799 births
1871 deaths
19th-century British botanists
19th-century English photographers
19th-century British women artists
19th-century British women scientists
English women photographers
People from Tonbridge
Pioneers of photography
Women botanists
Photographers from Kent
19th-century women photographers
People from Sevenoaks District