part of the jonathan ross collection
Stereoviews
Artists at Work
Hand coloured stereoview by an unidentified artist
My wife is a painter and sculptor with a studio at home, so sculpture stands and easels, and life models posing for her and her artist friends, are the stuff of my everyday life. It has amused me to collect images of artists’ studios, some documentary and others staged, as depicted by stereo photographers of the 19th century.
Most of the stereoviews in my collection come from the 1850s-60s but for this subsection of images of artists, both real and staged, I extended the parameters to cover the late 19th – early 20th century, including ‘curved mount’ cards and a set of comic ‘lithoprints’.
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.
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.
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