Anna Atkins
Pteris aquilina

Public Domain

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Images(2)

Artist Anna Atkins (British, 1799–1871)British, 1799–1871

CultureBritish

Titles

Pteris aquilina

Date1851

MediumCyanotype

DimensionsImage: 13 3/16 × 9 5/8 in. (33.5 × 24.4 cm)
Sheet: 13 3/16 × 9 5/8 in. (33.5 × 24.4 cm)
Mount: 18 15/16 × 14 3/4 in. (48.1 × 37.5 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2004.2133

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionLike her friend William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of paper photography, Anna Atkins was a serious botanist who recognized the potential of the new medium to accurately record the form and structure of plants. Following Talbot’s lead, she placed her specimens directly on sensitized paper, covered them with glass, and set them in the sun; wherever the sunlight hit, the paper darkened, and wherever the plant blocked the rays of the sun, the paper remained white. Atkins used the cyanotype process, a relatively simple procedure that yielded prints in striking shades of Prussian blue. Far more systematic than Talbot in her use of photography in the service of botany, she spent a decade self-publishing bound volumes of artistically arranged cyanotype photograms of algae, ferns, and flowering plants comprising hundreds of individual images.
ProvenanceHans P. Kraus Jr., Inc., New York; Jeffrey Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; from the unique album, "Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns" presented by Atkins to Anne Dixon; sold at Sotheby's, Belgravia, 28 October 1981 to Robert Hershkowitz, London. This plate to Harold Landry, London; Hans P. Kraus, Jr., Inc. New York; Jeffrey Fraenkel, San Francisco.

Bought by Manfred Heiting from Fraenkel Gallery on 3/23/1985.

Exhibition History"The Artist’s Palette: Primary Colors on Paper," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 16 April - 2 June 2013.

“Shadows on the Wall: Cameraless Photography from 1851 to Today” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, August 31– November 30, 2014.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Marked on image in white, recto: "Pteris aquilina"
Marked in pencil, verso, upper left corner: "97 / 14" [14 is crossed out], upper right corner: "SG70", lower right corner: "1258.10" [with horizontal line over numbers]
Marked in pencil, recto, lower right edge of mount: "AA153.X"

There is no evident signature.

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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