Anna Atkins
Encyclopedia
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photograph
Photograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
ic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph.
Early life
Anna Children was born in TonbridgeTonbridge
Tonbridge is a market town in the English county of Kent, with a population of 30,340 in 2007. It is located on the River Medway, approximately 4 miles north of Tunbridge Wells, 12 miles south west of Maidstone and 29 miles south east of London...
, Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1799. Her mother Hester Anne "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800. Anna became close to her father John George Children
John George Children
John George Children was a British chemist, mineralogist and zoologist.Children studied at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1822 he was working as a librarian in the Department of Antiquities at the British Museum when he was appointed assistant keeper of the Natural History Department in succession...
, who was a scientist of many interests; for example, he was honoured by having the mineral childrenite
Childrenite
Childrenite is a rare hydrated phosphate mineral with elements iron, manganese, aluminium, phosphorus, oxygen and hydrogen. Its chemical formula is AlPO42 • H2O and it has a molecular weight of 229.83 g/mol. Its specific gravity is 3.2 and it has a Mohs hardness of 4.5 to 5. It is usually...
and the Children's python, Antaresia childreni, named after him. She "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's Genera of Shells, which was published in 1823.
She married John Pelly Atkins in 1825, and they moved to Halstead Place, the Atkins family home in Sevenoaks
Sevenoaks (district)
Sevenoaks is a local government district covering the western most part of Kent in England. Its council is based in the town of Sevenoaks. It was formed on 1 April 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, by a merger of the Sevenoaks Urban District, Sevenoaks Rural District and part of Dartford...
, Kent. She then pursued her interests in botany, for example by collecting dried plants. These were probably used as photograms later.
Photography
John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Fox TalbotWilliam Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor and a pioneer of photography. He was the inventor of calotype process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an...
. 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 which is exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotype
Calotype
Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. The term calotype comes from the Greek for 'beautiful', and for 'impression'....
s.
Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841. Some sources claim that Atkins was the first female photographer. Other sources name Constance Talbot, the wife of William Fox Talbot, as the first female photographer. As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins or any photographs by Constance Talbot survive, the issue may never be resolved.
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
, a friend of Atkins and Children, invented the cyanotype
Cyanotype
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints...
photographic process in 1842. Within a year, Atkins applied the process to algae
Algae
Algae are a large and diverse group of simple, typically autotrophic organisms, ranging from unicellular to multicellular forms, such as the giant kelps that grow to 65 meters in length. They are photosynthetic like plants, and "simple" because their tissues are not organized into the many...
(specifically, seaweed
Seaweed
Seaweed is a loose, colloquial term encompassing macroscopic, multicellular, benthic marine algae. The term includes some members of the red, brown and green algae...
) by making cyanotype photogram
Photogram
A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used...
s that were contact print
Contact print
A contact print is a photographic image produced from film; sometimes from a film negative, and sometimes from a film positive. The defining characteristic of a contact print is that the photographic result is made by exposing through the film negative or positive, onto a light sensitive material...
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. 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 photograph
Photograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
ic images. Eight months later, in June 1844, the first fascicle of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature
The Pencil of Nature
The Pencil of Nature, published in six installments between 1844 and 1846, was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published" or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs"...
was released; that book was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published" or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs".
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- British LibraryBritish LibraryThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
, London, which provides scans of 429 pages of its copy (which has extra plates) online - Kelvingrove Art Gallery and MuseumKelvingrove Art Gallery and MuseumThe Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a museum and art gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. The building houses one of Europe's great civic art collections...
, Glasgow, Scotland - Metropolitan Museum of ArtMetropolitan Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, New York - New York Public LibraryNew York Public LibraryThe New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
, which provides scans of 285 pages of its copy online - Royal SocietyRoyal SocietyThe Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
, London, whose copy with 403 pages and 389 plates is thought to be the only existing copy of the book as Atkins intended - Victoria & Albert Museum London houses a number of original works in their library.
Because of the book's rarity and historical importance, it is quite expensive. One copy of the book with 411 plates in three volumes sold for GBP 133,500 at auction in 1996. Another copy with 382 prints in two volumes which was owned by scientist Robert Hunt (1807-1887)
Robert Hunt (scientist)
Robert Hunt , a scientist and antiquarian, was born at Devonport, Plymouth, in the United Kingdom. He was involved in statistical, mineralogical and other studies. He died in London on 17 October 1887.-Early life:...
sold for GBP 229,250 at auction in 2004.
Later life and work
- Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853), now in the J. Paul Getty MuseumJ. Paul Getty MuseumThe J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...
. - 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).
In addition, she published books with non-photographic work:
- Atkins, Anna. The perils of fashion. London, 1852.
- Atkins, Anna. The Colonel. A story of fashionable life. By the author of "The perils of fashion." London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853.
- Atkins, Anna. Memoir of J.C. Children, including some unpublished poetry by his father and himself. London: John Bowye Nichols and Sons, 1853.
- Atkins, Anna. Murder will out. A story of real life. By the author of "The colonel," etc. London, 1859.
- Atkins, Anna. A page from the peerage. By the author of "The colonel." London, 1863.
She died at Halstead Place in 1871 of "paralysis, rheumatism, and exhaustion" at the age of 72.