A Brief History of Blue

Items

• Sir John Herschel
  This image depicts "Sir John Herschel, Victorian England’s preeminent scientist, astronomer, and mathematician, considered the equal of Sir Isaac Newton. Herschel wrote to her in Calcutta of Henry Talbot’s invention of photography and sent her the first photographs she had ever seen. Of her 1867 portraits of Herschel, she wrote: “From my earliest girlhood I had loved and honoured him, and it was after a friendship of 31 years’ duration that the high task of giving his portrait to the nation was allotted to me.” Of the four exposures Cameron made in April 1867, Herschel preferred this one, which portrayed him, he thought, as an 'old Paterfamilias.'"