Dandelion Seeds by Jaques

Bertha E. Jaques :: Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium Officinale, ca. 1910, cyanotype photogram. | src Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bertha E. Jaques :: Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium Officinale, ca. 1910, cyanotype photogram. (detail) | src Smithsonian American Art Museum — **Bertha E. Jaques ::** Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium Officinale, ca. 1910, cyanotype photogram. | src Smithsonian American Art Museum

**Bertha Evelyn Jaques ::** Dandelion Seeds. A starry firmament, 1904. Cyanotype. | src MutualArt

**Bertha E. Jaques ::** Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium Officinale, ca. 1910, cyanotype photogram (full size). Scan from color transparency. | src Smithsonian American Art Museum

Jaques was already a respected printmaker when she began making cyanotype photograms of wildflowers. An active member of the Wild Flower Preservation Society, she created over a thousand of these botanical images. [See Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium Officinale, SAAM, 1994.91.89] Made without a camera by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing it to light, the photogram is the least industrialized type of photography. Because prints were easy to produce by this method, it achieved wide popularity. Graphic artists often chose this form of print because of its rich Prussian blue color. Aligned with the antimodernist views of the late Victorian Arts and Crafts movement, Jaques’s work reflects a reverence for commonplace elements of nature and the beautifully crafted object.

Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). From Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)

Dandelion Seeds, ca. 1858

William Henry Fox Talbot :: Dandelion Seeds, 1858 or later.
Photogravure (photoglyphic engraving from a copper plate). | source The Metropolitan Museum of Art — **William Henry Fox Talbot ::** Dandelion Seeds, 1858 or later.
Photogravure (photoglyphic engraving from a copper plate). | source The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This experimental proof is a fine example of the capacity of Talbot’s “photoglyphic engraving” to produce photographic results that could be printed on a press, using printer’s ink-a more permanent process than photographs made with light and chemicals. Like Talbot’s earliest photographic examples, the image here was photographically transferred to the copper engraving plate by laying the seeds directly on the photosensitized plate and exposing it to light, without the aid of a camera. Equally reminiscent of Talbot’s early experiments, this image is part of Talbot’s lifelong effort to apply his various photographic inventions to the field of botany. In a letter tipped into the Bertoloni Album, Talbot wrote, “Je crois que ce nouvel art de mon invention sera d’un grand secours aux Botanistes” (“I think that my newly invented art will be a great help to botanists”). Such uses were still prominent in Talbot’s thinking years later when developing his photogravure process; he noted in 1863 that “if this art [of photoglyphic engraving] had been invented a hundred years ago, it would have been very useful during the infancy of botany.” Had early botanists been able to print fifty copies of each engraving, he continued, and had they sent them to distant colleagues, “it would have greatly aided modern botanists in determining the plants intended by those authors, whose descriptions are frequently so incorrect that they are like so many enigmas, and have proved a hindrance and not an advantage to science.” [quoted from The Met]

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