Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
Born into a Huguenot family, Delamotte was inspired by his father, the drawing master at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. His two brothers were also artists, and he quickly became a skilled illustrator and engraver, contributing engravings to the Society of Arts. His watercolor landscapes are picturesque, yet still realistic and not overly stylized. Photography eventually emerged as Delamotte’s major passion and artistic outlet. With truth to nature the goal, the new art also comfortably complemented the range of his artistic endeavors. In 1850 Delamotte, as described in a publication that year, “availed himself of that ingenious invention the Talbotype” to reproduce copies of Roman art newly discovered in Cirencester. Soon after, the writer and architect M. Digby Wyatt called upon Delamotte to produce watercolors of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and Delamotte also made calotypes of the construction of the Crystal Palace, where Wyatt was superintendent building works. Delamotte secured a license from Talbot and began to offer calotypes, becoming the first truly successful commercial calotypist in England. One of the most prolific contributors to photographic exhibitions in Britain, beginning with the pivotal exhibition at the Society of Arts in 1852, he worked primarily in collodion. However, his contributions to the society’s 1855-56 exhibition marked a return to the paper negative. His subject here was again the Crystal Palace, now reerected at Sydenham, and perhaps Delamotte turned to paper to avoid the halation problems that were endemic with glass negatives. Commissioned by the Crystal Palace Company, these are his finest photographs. He continued to exhibit through 1861, sometimes in conjunction with his business partners, Robert Howlett and, later, George Downes, but only once more in paper negative - a calotype view of a lake in Wales for the 1856 exhibition of the Manchester Photographic Society. Always interested in teaching, in 1853 Delamotte published The Practice of Photography, which would be a starting point for many new to the art. In 1855 he was appointed the professor of drawing and perspective at King’s College, London. One of Delamotte’s most important contributions to photography was his promotion of the oxymel process, which was invented by his friend John Dillwyn Llewelyn. A mixture of honey and vinegar, oxymel made it possible to use a collodion glass plate in a dry condition, thus enabling a photographer to prepare plates in advance. The portability of the paper negative was thereby combined with the detail of the glass, and Delamotte’s 1856 The Oxymel Process in Photography helped to popularize the new approach, a harbinger of the factory-made dry plates that began to arrive a few decades later.