Sarah Anne Bright

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Portrait of Sarah Anne Bright
Sarah Anne Bright's "Quillan Leaf" (1839)

Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866) was a 19th-century English artist and photographer who created the first extant photographic images of a woman. The authorship of her photographic work was only ascertained in 2015 after a photogram that came from her was up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York.

biography

Bright lived in Bristol , England. She was one of nine children of the Richard Bright couple (1754-1840) and Sarah Heywood Bright. Her father was a wealthy merchant and banker who is known to have had a keen interest in science. In 1823 he was one of the founders of the "Bristol Institute for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art". Little is known about the life of Sarah Anne Bright herself.

Her role as a photography pioneer was discovered after a collection of old photographs known as the Quillan Collection went up for sale at Sotheby's auction house in New York in 2008.

Originally one of the photos in the collection, a photogram with the name "The Quillan Leaf" or "The Leaf", was assigned to the British photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot . However, an examination of the picture by Talbot expert Professor Larry Schaaf revealed that Talbot was not the author of the picture. Therefore it was listed in the Sotheby's sales catalog with the note “photographer unknown”. The catalog entry contained three pages with documentation and comments by Schaaf. Speculation about the possible origin of the image and the theory that it might be one of the oldest existing photograms led to the sale being suspended.

Further investigation by the expert Larry Schaaf revealed that the photogram "The Leaf" had been sold in 1984 at Sotheby's in London for £ 6,000 by the Bright family from Bristol. It originally belonged to a series of seven pictures on the side of an album, which was split up for auction and thus found different owners.

The speculation about “The Leaf” led one of the other owners to contact Schaaf and pass on information about a watermark on another of the seven pictures. This information made it possible to trace the photogram back to Bristol.

The album, which had originally contained "The Leaf", came from the possession of the merchant and the MP Henry Bright. It became clear that the picture had been taken by one of his family members, either himself or one of his five siblings. After contacting families in the UK and Australia and viewing the Melbourne archives, Professor Schaaf attributed the work to Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866). The inscriptions on "The Leaf" match the handwriting on their watercolors and other material in the archive, so that, according to his expertise, the authorship is confirmed by Sarah Anne Bright.

Schaaf presented his research results in a lecture at the University of Lincoln in June 2015 and found that many photo experiments had been carried out at the time in question, but that nowadays only very few photograms from this time are in a similarly good condition and can be proven by the origin as well as Bright's image of a leaf.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Bright of Ham Green . Retrieved July 11, 2015.
  2. ^ British Museum: The History of the Collections Contained in the Natural History Departments of the British Museum: Libraries. Volume 1. , Volume 1. order of the Trustees of the British Museum, 1904, pp. 271–72 (accessed August 2, 2015).
  3. ↑ Carol Vogel: Photographs for Auction . Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  4. ↑ Larry Schaaf: Tempestuous teacups and enigmatic leaves . Retrieved September 12, 2015.
  5. ↑ Nick Clark: How a 170-year-old 'Leaf' provoked a hunt for the world's first photographer. Independent, July 5, 2015, accessed January 30, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Bright, Sarah Anne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English film pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH 1793
PLACE OF BIRTH Bristol , England
DATE OF DEATH 1866