Lot Essay
Full-figure studio portrait, the sitter in full mandarin costume seated next to a table with a stack of English books.
Crystoleum portraits from life are now unusual as the process was more commonly used for reproducing works of art. A thin albumen print was mounted face down on a convex glass sheet and abraded until almost worn through. The back was then lightly hand-coloured and protected by another sheet of paper, the effect being that of a finely coloured photograph. For a fuller description of the crystoleum process which was popular from the 1880s until the 1910s see Luis Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic and Photomechanical Processes, Vol. 1, p. 80, or Coe and Haworth Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes, p. 19
Crystoleum portraits from life are now unusual as the process was more commonly used for reproducing works of art. A thin albumen print was mounted face down on a convex glass sheet and abraded until almost worn through. The back was then lightly hand-coloured and protected by another sheet of paper, the effect being that of a finely coloured photograph. For a fuller description of the crystoleum process which was popular from the 1880s until the 1910s see Luis Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic and Photomechanical Processes, Vol. 1, p. 80, or Coe and Haworth Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes, p. 19