Hawthornes Antiques

Description

A charming image of a mid Victorian elderly lady.

Glass plate housed within a red leather bound case. Working brass clip. Ambrotypes are one of the earliest forms of photography after the Daguerreotype.

A fairly easy item to accurately date, Ambrotypes were introduced in the early 1850s and by the mid 1860s superseded by tintypes and paper photographs. Each is a unique original.

One side of a glass pane is coated with a thin layer of iodised collodion then dipped in silver nitrate. Exposed in the camera while wet for between 5 and 50 seconds before being developed and set. The negative image is viewed against a black background, in this case a piece of velvet, producing a clear and detailed image.