The first recognised photograph, Nicéphore Niépce’s image of a rooftop at Le Gras, was taken from an open window, and thereafter photography went outdoors in search of the available light. In Edinburgh, it would not come indoors to record the interior of a building for its own sake until 1868.
By that time, Frederick Scott Archer’s invention of the magical, cumbersome wet collodion process had swept away both Hill and Adamson’s calotypes and James Hawes’s daguerreotypes and eclipsed the exposure times possible to either. Archer’s process combined the soul-snatching clarity and depth of the daguerreotype with the calotype’s ability to reproduce images through the creation of a negative. What the wet collodion process opened up was infinite and for everyone: tintype portraits on the beach for the holidaying working classes of the industrial cities; a carte de visite for every middle class gentlemen and woman; the stereoscopic photograph for excited children at Christmas; the lantern slide for the lecturer and the scientist; beautiful albumen and carbon prints of the wonders of the world for armchair travellers and collectors, and an absorbing hobby for the professional gentleman in his leisuretime.
Archer had refused the possibility of extraordinary wealth to give it freely to the world. He died in poverty in 1857, and the wet collodion empires would belong instead to Francis Frith of England, James Valentine of Dundee, and an Aberdonian genius with the remarkable name of George Washington Wilson. The rest of this story is Wilson’s, as it was his camera that entered Edinburgh’s Signet Library in the summer of 1868 to make exposures that were part of the first photographic depiction in history of the interior of Edinburgh buildings. He’d begun his career as a portrait miniaturist, switching to photography not long after Archer’s revolution was first underway. Early success saw him in receipt of Prince Albert’s patronage and a role as the first real royal photographer. He was technically accomplished, and painstaking to the extent that the extraordinary perfection of his landscape photography can mask the real artistry and brilliance involved.
Wilson’s relationship with Edinburgh began in 1859, with a series of unsuccessful (but now rare and sought after) stereoscopic images of Princes Street. He returned the following year to replace them, and over the next twenty years he and his firm would create a catalogue of images of Edinburgh and Leith that constitute one of the most precious records of the Victorian capital. The most important archive of his work is at the University of Aberdeen, who received the George Washington Wilson firm’s surviving negatives; other major deposits are held by City of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums, the University of St. Andrews, Historic Environment Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland. This is a golden age of Scottish photographic curatorship and gratitude is due to the staff of these institutions for the world-class online presentations of these collections and the superb printed works accompanying exhibitions.
Why did it take so long for the photography of interiors to get underway? The answer, in brief, is light. The human eye can make sense of a far wider range of light and dark than even modern cameras. We can see the inside of a room and the view from the window easily at the same time. Victorian photographic emulsions could not. In the relative darkness of a room, an exposure long enough to capture interior detail would risk bleaching out from the light from the window. It was something Victorian painters like James Tissot understood and exploited, keeping a role alive for reproductive painting decades into the age of photography. Even out of doors, there were issues. By the time the photographic plate had been exposed long enough to capture the detail of the landscape, all detail from the brighter sky had been lost. It is no coincidence that the early successful interior shots were taken in top lit spaces, like the Crystal Palace at the 1851 Great Exhibition, or the Free Library in Melbourne captured by Barnett Johnson in 1859. George Washington Wilson was one of the first photographers to succeed in capturing both a landscape and a cloudscape in the same exposure, and it was this achievement that equipped him to attempt interior shots in the dim, smoky, northern light of the Scottish capital.
It is only because Wilson selected the Upper Hall of the Signet Library as one of his initial three interiors that we can attempt to date his interior work at all. The paper archives of his firm are almost completely lost, and what remains gives no hint that they took an interest in the chronology of their images in any case. The numbering that appears on the interior Edinburgh exposures refers to place rather than time. The earliest George Washington Wilson catalogue held at the University of Aberdeen is dated 1877 and so provides a latest-possible date for the images it lists, where a confident identification can be made between the catalogue description and a surviving negative. All three of the interiors captured by Wilson – the Playfair Library at the University of Edinburgh’s Old College (numbered 179), New College Library on Mound Place (numbered 186) and the Signet Library (numbered 194) are present in the 1877 catalogue. The proximity of the location numbers and the stylistic similarity of the images gives rise to my belief that all three were photographed during the same period and as part of a single concerted effort.
The first Wilson images of the Signet Library’s Upper Hall show a library with no furniture, no carpets and no books on the shelves. The Garnkirk Urn is situated under the Cupola and the Gallery no longer extends across the Great Window. This set of circumstances confine the images to the summer of 1868, towards the end of the first refurbishment and redecoration of the room since it opened in 1822. The University of Aberdeen holds two negatives – one stereoscopic plate and one ordinary. The Signet Library holds a stereoscopic print of the view (and Historic Environment Scotland hold an unattributed copy in their Richard Emerson collection). The City of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums holds what appears to be an ordinary negative in the same size plate as the Aberdeen stereoscopic image. I have a glass slide of this view in my own collection (above) and have seen one other in private ownership.
I believe that Wilson returned to the Signet Library not long after – either later in the summer of 1868 or in the summer of the following year – and captured exposures of the Upper Hall after the new carpets had been installed and the furniture replaced but still in pristine restored condition, the scraped and revarnished floor resplendent. Aberdeen hold one such image which they connect with an entry in the 1877 George Washington Wilson catalogue. I hold a print of this view and another survives in an album held by Historic Environment Scotland.
The Signet Library holds another print (reproduced at the head of this post) from this sequence of the refurbished and refurnished Upper Hall. Unlike all of the exposures discussed so far, this is a view facing eastwards along the Hall towards the entrance door. However, it can be associated with the westward-facing furnished image because the books on the round table are arranged identically, as is all visible furniture: these images were captured on the same occasion.
Ostensibly this last view only survives in this single print at the Signet Library. However, there are a pair of glass negatives at Historic Environment Scotland, attributed to the architect William Notman and dated 1890, that I believe should be reattributed to George Washington Wilson and listed as part of the 1868-1869 furnished Upper Hall sequence. Historic Environment Scotland’s William Notman collection is an extensive photographic tour of architectural views and building detail, clearly the work of many different photographers at different times and employing different techniques. Much of the work is of professional quality and unlikely to be Notman’s own.
In the early 1970s the Signet Librarian George Hodge Ballantyne had a print made from one of these plates as part of the research towards his MA thesis which was adapted into his 1979 book The Signet Library and its Librarians 1722-1972. The image was never published but we retain a copy. It too depicts the eastward view towards the Upper Hall door, with the same arrangement of the books on the table and the furniture more generally, but the photographer has deployed a lens with a different focal length. We know that at about this time Wilson was switching his allegiance to the then new Aplanap lens – was this image an early experiment with it, or a reversion to an earlier lens?
Given that Wilson’s images of the Signet Library were amongst his earliest attempts at capturing an interior, it is worth looking briefly at how he approached his exposures of what is, after all, a very long and narrow space (and how this compares with contemporary printmakers and others).
Of the 1868 shots, the stereoscopic image seems to take its lead from Wilson’s photographs of the similarly long and narrow High Street and Canongate. It is taken at a slight angle (which the format perhaps demands) that prioritises the detail of one side over the other whilst including both. By contrast, the ordinary plate attempts a reprise of Thomas Hosmer Shepherd’s engraving of the Upper Hall, adopting a more central stance looking directly towards the window, with the main attention being paid to the central round table and beyond, but without the artist’s freedom to manipulate the perspective. The 1868-69 furnished exposures again take Wilson’s “street” approach with one side favoured.
Unfortunately, the Signet Library archive holds no record of George Washington Wilson’s visits and we are reliant on the internal evidence of the images themselves to confirm their dates. This is entirely typical of the Library’s record-keeping – the visit of the Country Life photographers in 1925 is met with silence, and the presence of the painter Patrick Adam, who created at least seven full scale oil paintings of the Library between 1910 and 1918 is recorded in the archive by a single letter in the artist’s own hand.
However, it is likely that Wilson’s access to the Library was owing to one man: the librarian, better known now as the historian David Laing, Victorian Scotland’s greatest antiquarian and collector. Laing exhibited an interest in photography from the earliest days – he was photographed in early middle age by Hill and Adamson, and the Signet Library holds two photographic portraits of him, in addition to which he is known to have had at least one carte de visite portrait taken which he distributed complete with his signature. Since the early 1850s Laing’s librarianship of the Signet had been conducted at loggerheads with the library curators and any permission he granted Wilson to photograph the library is highly unlikely to have taken anyone else’s views into account. Given that Wilson would have had to have had some form of darkroom at hand – perhaps a wheeled darkroom parked immediately outside the Library in Parliament Square – it’s not immediately clear that those other views would have been in favour.
The Signet Library is rather more than just its well-known Upper Hall. The Lower Hall is arguably the more interesting space, which perhaps should have been the subject of Wilson’s photography. Was Wilson in the wrong room? And there are many other rooms besides which have attracted photographers since as exposures have shortened and the capacity of film and sensors has improved. But the Upper Hall was David Laing’s territory of choice and the place in which Scotland’s visiting historians and antiquarians could know to find him. The Lower Hall would not be photographed, insofar as we know, until the first visit of Her late Majesty the Queen in 1953.
But Laing’s Upper Hall was not the pristine, elegant Regency space of Wilson’s technically brilliant and polished images. Visitors record finding Laing at work surrounded by towering book forts build up out of unshelved volumes, paper everywhere. The Curators’ minutes contain complaints about the state of the room and question whether the piles of books have indeed been properly bound and entered into the catalogue; their periodic attempt to limit the access of Laing’s visitors speaks of a place that was a far remove from the monastic quiet suggested by Wilson’s photographs. There is a question here, of whether the truest representation of the room would show it, as in Wilson’s images, empty and pristine, ready perhaps for life but cleared of it – in the style of so much photography of classic Edinburgh, which seeks to exclude the human and the contextual in favour of the clean and timeless (and lifeless).
Perhaps there is an idea of a library that tries to rise “above” the human activity and mess and noise into some elevated realm of quiet and scholarship and it is this that Wilson attempted. Equally, given that he was present during the summer when the Library’s custom was to close for the legal vacation, the circumstances offered him little alternative.
The classic image – and indeed, the only image – of the Signet Library interior prior to Wilson’s arrival was the 1829 engraving by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd. The arrival on the market of stereoscopic prints, glass slides and paper prints of Wilson’s photographs at the end of the 1860s presented Shepherd with a rival. It is interesting that the engraving in Grant’s Edinburgh Old and New in 1880 drew on and updated Shepherd’s image (retaining the gallery across the window that was removed during the 1868 renovation) whereas the 1886 work Edinburgh Past and Present actually took Wilson’s 1868 photographs as its model.
If there was such a Platonic ideal of a great library elevated above mere human concerns, the Edinburgh engravers of the 1880s show no sign of this. Wilson’s photograph is furnished (to some slight extent!) and both rooms are heavily populated – not just by lawyers or scholars, but by everyone. Entire families are present, and both sexes are reading and consulting works.
Context and social commentary aside, it remains to be said that Wilson’s photographs of the 1868-1869 Signet Library remain unsurpassed as images of the classic Signet Library at its height. Even Patrick Adam’s fine painting of the Upper Library of c. 1918 despite its warmth and rich colours does not come close to the light and majesty that Wilson achieved. Wilson’s were amongst the first interior photographs of Edinburgh – and may well have actually been the first. But they have never been matched since.