Early Photographic Methods: Anthotypes and Cyanotypes

Anthotype of raspberry leaves made on paper coated with juice from day lily petals

Anthotype of plants made on paper coated with older day lily blooms

Making art using plants lead me to experimenting with anthotypes, an early photographic method of coating paper with juice from photosensitive plants and then exposing them, for hours or even days, to sunlight. I've had varied results. It can be a little unpredictable. Some argue that this medium is always ephemeral, and always subject to fading, but some anthotypes exist which were made a century ago. So if carefully stored or displayed (away from direct sunlight and/or under UV-resistant glass), they can be long-lasting. 

Reading up about the method I learned that it was invented by none other than great mathematician, writer and polymath, Mary Somerville (1780-1872). 

My linocut portrait of Mary Somerville

She wrote about her findings in a letter to Sir John Herschel (nephew of Caroline, also in my women in STEM series). Herschel presented her results to the Royal Society* & did a lot of further research on early photographic methods, so he is often credited with this invention too. 

Sir John Herschel's own accomplishments include the discovery of the cyanotype method to make images first used in 1842, which produces a cyan blue print used today for monochromatic art or blueprints. It is made using a slow-reacting, photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet and blue light spectrum, the range 300nm to 400nm known as UVA radiation. Two chemicals are mixed: potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate, and coated on a surface.

The first person to publish a book with photographs was botanist and scientific illustrator Anna Atkins. A friend of both William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, and Sir John Herschel, she was well positioned to understand what these methods could mean to scientific illustration, and as such she was acting as a science employing the high tech imaging of her day. When I made her portrait, I carved her as a linocut and then combined that with a blue screen print of fern leaves to mimic the look of the cyanotypes that she used in her books on seaweed and ferns. I have long wanted to make her portrait with actual cyanotypes so, that was my first goal when I started experimenting with making cyanotypes on paper and fabric.

Anna Atkins, linocut and cyanotype by Ele Willoughby, 2022

I have also been making a number of cyanotypes of plants and sometimes incorporating my linocut images on acetate. These are mediums which have a lot of potential and I'm experimenting!

Cyanotype of Queen Anne's Lace by Ele Willoughby

Cyanotype with linocuts of moths, flowers, grasses, and narcomedusa by Ele Willoughby

Cyanotype of my Narcomedusa linocut

*On the Action of the Rays of the Spectrum on Vegetable Juices. Extract of a Letter from Mrs. M Somerville to Sir J.F.W. Herschel, Bart., dated Rome, September 20, 1845. Communicated by Sir J. Herschel. Received November 6, -Read November 27, 1845, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 136 (1846), p. 111-120.

Narcomedusae Jellyfish Linocut

I made this dainty lino block print of a Narcomedusae order of jellyfish on beautiful handmade deep blue Japanese Chitose Gunjo paper with silk fibres which add to the organic feel of the piece and makes each print rather unique. Each print in this edition of 10, is 4.5 inches by 8 inches or 11.3 cm by 20.3 cm.

Jellyfish have such beautiful, fluid, organic lines. This seems to mirror the view of Ernst Haekel, the famed German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist (and influence on me), whose book "Art Forms in Nature" filled with lovely 19th century scientific illustrations of biology inspired my original drawing and then carving in linoleum of this creature. In fact, Haekel himself named this order of animals in 1879.

I've been wondering about their name. The discomedusa sounds like a medusa (as in jellyfish, rather than Μέδουσα the snake-headed Gorgon of Greek myth) boogieing on the dance floor, but of course, the "disco-" refers to its disk-like shape. "Narco-" means "numbness or torpor" rather than indicating that this jellyfish is somehow involved in the drug trade. Now, I don't know if these jellies are numb or torpid, or whether they sting (something which often leads to numbness). Haeckel's other medusas are the tracho- or tranchymedusa ("rough" medusa), leptomedusa ("thin, fine or slight" medusa), peromedusa ("malformed" medusa, ouch!), anthomedusa ("flower" medusa), stauromedusa ("cross", as in the shape rather than the mood, medusa), and cubomedusa (which are the box jellyfish). So now you know.