Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
Piazzi Smyth, as he was universally known, would probably have rebelled at the thought of a being a laboratory experiment, but he is an ideal case study in the early history of the calotype. Born in Naples to Admiral William Henry Smyth, a close friend of Sir John Herschel, Smyth was able to balance this scientific heritage with the artistic sensibilities he got from his mother, Arabella, a fine painter. He was a clever sketch artist, devastating in his observations of his fellow man; a talented inventor of scientific instruments; and a tireless and careful researcher. His sister’s scandalous marriage to the very much older scientist Baden Powell produced Robert Baden Powell, perhaps best remembered for founding the Boy Scouts. Smyth was a brilliant young man but a shy one with a stutter. Posted to South Africa as an astronomer’s assistant, he was given the opportunity to be in close communication with Herschel during the late 1830s. Sir John returned to England on the eve of the public introduction of photography. As the events of 1839 unfolded, he sent examples and instructions to Smyth in the Cape, carefully compensating for what he knew would be the absence of certain materials in the colony. Herschel also opened up direct lines of communication between Talbot and other pioneers with Smyth. Thus, Smyth worked with the most complete instructions, both published and directly from the inventors, although isolated by three months and thousands of miles from other practitioners. He experimented on his own, following these directions, but without the interactions that influenced the course of photography in Europe. His calotypes produced around Cape Town are certainly the earliest ones made in Africa and also in many ways preserve the purest intent of the original inventors in Europe. In 1845 the young man was appointed to the prestigious but frustrating position of astronomer royal for Scotland, posted on Calton Hill immediately above Robert Adamson’s calotype studio. In 1856, on the eve of his departure for Tenerife in the Canary Islands on an expedition designed to carry an astronomical telescope “above the clouds,” Herschel recommended Smyth as “an excellent photographer” and suggested he document his trip. Smyth quickly learned wet-collodion photography from Joseph James Forrester and accomplished his goal. Although his scientific reputation will always be shadowed by his research in Egypt, which bore fruit in many publications on the Great Pyramid, Smyth was an innovative photographer through-out his life, constantly assisted by his wife, Jessie. Together they made metal cameras, designed high-speed shutters, enlarged miniature negatives, published photographically illustrated works, and ended life photographing clouds, much in a manner later popularized by Alfred Stieglitz. Although Smyth exhibited his scientific instruments, he never participated in photographic exhibitions.