Giant Daguerreotypes and Microscopic Portraits
In March 1849, Mayall exhibited "the largest daguerreotype portraits ever taken in 'England". In The Times newspaper of July 1, 1850, Mayall claimed that he could "take portraits from 30 inches in length down to the microscopic size." (The Science Museum of London possesses a large daguerreotype portrait from this period which measures 29 inches by 25 inches.)
He applied his skills in microphotography to produce very small portraits which could be set in jewellery. A memorial ring in gold and black enamel, containing a microphotograph of Albert, Prince Consort, believed to have been taken by Mayall in 1861, is held today in the Royal Family's Photograph Collection.
Read more about this topic: John Jabez Edwin Mayall
Famous quotes containing the words giant, microscopic and/or portraits:
“In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)