Painting with fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, photography, and the temporally evolving chemical object

Abstract

"This book does nothing less than revise the history of photography in its incipient moments. It tells a story of radical chemical experiments at the London academies, and he traces how some of the most exciting reproductive techniques and patents of the late eighteenth century fared during the nineteenth, when entrepreneurs tried to refine them into alternative technologies to photography"--

Contents

Slow-Motion Mobiles -- "Pictures . . . in time petrify'd' -- Joshua Reynolds's "Nice Chymistry in the 1770s -- "Rend'rd Imortal': The Work of Art in an Age of Chemical -- Reproduction -- Space, Time, and Chemistry: Making Enlightenment -- "Photography' in the 1860s -- Conclusion: Art History in/as an Age of Combustion.