| Dates: | 1828 - ? | | Active: | UK |
Preparing biographies
The Birmingham firm of Robert Field & Son, philosophical instrument makers, would have been drawn naturally into photography. The son who joined his father in partnership was the younger one, also Robert. Two 1845 portraits made by the son are preserved in the Richard Willats album (now at Princeton University), at least one of them a rare practical implementation of Dr. Thomas Woods’s Catalysotype process. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, in addition to photographic lenses, the Fields displayed “Calotype pictures: Scene, Forest of Arden, Warwickshire; staircase, Haddon Hall, Derbyshire; and Wych Elm, Packington churchyard, Warwickshire.” Perhaps these were their own photographs, or perhaps they anticipated the later promotional efforts of George Eastman, who distributed cameras to photographers of the day in order to secure examples for advertising his wares.
Roger Taylor & Larry J. Schaaf Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 4 Nov 2012.
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