part of the jonathan ross collection
Stereoviews
Alfred Silvester
Returning from the Derby
Explore the work of Alfred Silvester, who also issued views under the name of Phiz, with the following links which take you to a series of images and notes about each stereoview. These open in a new tab or window.
A comfortable size for freeviewing (parallel viewing) the images in the linked pdf documents is 125% or 150%. This can be adjusted at the top right of the document.
Scenes of family life, Visits to the Artist’s Boudoir, Various Nocturnal Disturbances, Visits to the Theatre, Declarations of Love, Music Lessons, The Hero’s Wife series, Masonic Initiations, and many more beautifully tinted views.
Carriage Drives, Picnics in the woods, The Happy Homes of England, Scenes from Urban Life, The National Sports series of a trip to the Derby with multiple variants, Starting for Boulogne, Rustic Music and many other examples of Silvester’s best work.
Stereoviews replicate the way we see the world by taking two views of a scene, one from the right eye position and another from the left. When these are mounted together and viewed in a stereoscope, the brain merges them into a 3-dimensional or ‘stereoscopic’ image.
The technique emerged in the 1850s, soon after the invention of photography, through the work of Charles Wheatstone and Sir David Brewster, and developed into a worldwide craze with thousands of practitioners.
Stereo photography has gone out of fashion several times over the past couple of centuries, only to be rediscovered by later generations. Most of the images on this site are by European photographers working in the 1850s and 60s.