National Portrait Gallery: Its state events—coronations, openings of Parliament, and changings of the guard—are almost the last remaining manifestations of medieval royal pageantry. Many of its institutions—from the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Gallery, Covent Garden, and the Bank of England to Lloyds of London and the Boy Scouts—are headquarters of international activity.
Stapp, William F. Robert Cornelius: Portraits from the Dawn
of Photography. Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery,
1983. Bibl.
Other artists used photography in a more slavish manner, basing whole compositions on the Camera image. This was particularly true of portraiture. William Etty's Self Portrait (London, National Portrait Gallery) is hardly more than an enlarged copy of a calotype by Hill and Adamson, made in 1844, on the occasion of the artist's visit to Edinburgh. Many American painters relied upon daguerreotypes in the pose and delineation of the features of celebrities. Charles Loring Eliot, a popular American portraitist, for example, based his painting of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper on a daguerreotype ascribed to Mathew B.
Brady. |
