Hillotype, print of headless soldier
Hillotype, print of headless soldier
Usage conditions apply
- Description (Brief)
- The Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History holds an extraordinary series of early color photographs: sixty-two color daguerreotype plates made by Rev. Levi L. Hill in the early 1850s in Westkill, Greene County, New York. This is the largest collection in the world of Heliochromy, a rare early color photographic process based on silver chloride.
- Hill’s color process was extremely complex, consisting of coating a daguerreotype plate with multiple layers of a compound of different metals that reacted to the different colors in the spectrum. The achievement of inventing a color photographic process in 1850 was even more remarkable considering that Hill was not trained as a scientist and lived in a very remote area of New York State.
- Yet Hill was undisputably an important figure in early history of American photography, an entrepreneur and an enthusiastic innovator. He wrote the first, and one of the best, manuals on daguerreotypy, "A Treatise on Daguerreotype" in 1850; and in 1856 he wrote the first manual on color photography, "Treatise on Heliochromy", which includes a description of his experiments and an overview of all the means of chemically producing pictures in natural colors with light.
- Among the important works by Hill are many daguerreotype photographs of European color prints, and art reproductions such as this Hillotype copying a print of a headless soldier sitting on a golden cube in a studio room. X-ray analysis of this Hillotype plate shows traces of iron pigment in the yellow/gold area.
- Object Name
- photograph
- Hillotype
- Photograph
- date made
- ca 1850s-1860s
- maker
- Hill, Levi
- Physical Description
- copper (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: 8 1/2 in x 6 1/2 in; 21.59 cm x 16.51 cm
- ID Number
- PG.003999.27
- catalog number
- 3999.27
- accession number
- 125759
- See more items in
- Work and Industry: Photographic History
- Photography
- Hillotypes
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
Nominate this object for photography.
Our collection database is a work in progress. We may update this record based on further research and review. Learn more about our approach to sharing our collection online.
If you would like to know how you can use content on this page, see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use. If you need to request an image for publication or other use, please visit Rights and Reproductions.
Note: Comment submission is temporarily unavailable while we make improvements to the site. We apologize for the interruption. If you have a question relating to the museum's collections, please first check our Collections FAQ. If you require a personal response, please use our Contact page.
