Blue prints: Anna Atkins’ Cyanotype Impressions

"As a skilled botanical illustrator, Anna was part of a largely invisible community of women whose significant contributions to scientific advancement have gone mostly unnoticed."

By Margie MacKinnon

Originally published in

RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine

SPRING/SUMMER, Issue 9

Anna Atkins, Carix (America), c. 1848-1853, George Eastman House International Museum

of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York

In 1842, scientist John Herschel coined the term ‘cyanotype’ to describe his camera-less printmaking technique. While searching for a quick and easy method to make copies of his notes and diagrams, he discovered that by laying an object on paper coated with a solution of iron salts, exposing it to UV light, and then washing it with water, he could create stunning white and Prussian blue images. When Herschel shared his invention with friends in the Royal Society, Britain’s foremost scientific body, John George Children, a former director of the British Museum’s natural history collection, and his daughter, Anna Atkins, were among the first to learn of the process.

As a skilled botanical illustrator, Anna was part of a largely invisible community of women whose significant contributions to scientific advancement have gone mostly unnoticed. It was common for women, often the wives or daughters of male scientists, to produce the illustrations in scientific texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was, in fact, a centuries’ old tradition. Baroque painter Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670) was renowned for her still lifes, which rendered every feature of her floral subjects in exquisite detail. She started her career in Florence, where she had access to the most up-to-date microscopic lenses, perfected by Galileo Galilei, through which to observe her specimens. Some of Garzoni’s botanic illustrations were created specifically for use by natural historians who prized their accuracy in identifying and differentiating similar species of plants. In the century that followed, collage artist Mary Delany (1700-1788) leaned into the innovative Linnaean system of classifying flora and fauna, using it to identify her 985 individual flower portraits (see Issue XX). She produced each one by combining scores of carefully cut paper shapes and mounting them onto black backgrounds. Though simple, her technique was refined enough to create images that were not only beautiful but recognised by botanists as being faithful in every detail to their natural models.

Anna’s drawing skills had first been put to use to illustrate her father’s translation of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells. The study of shells was then popular as part of early attempts to formulate a theory of evolution to explain the slow but constant change of nature over time. An engraver transformed Anna’s drawings into etched plates for printing, which were published in three issues of The Quarterly Journal of Science in 1823. Originally attributed to “A.C.”, when the articles were later printed and bound as a single volume, Children ensured that “Miss Anna Children” was credited in large type on the title page.

Anna Atkins, Halydrys siliquosa, c. 1853, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons

Following her marriage to John Pelly Atkins in 1825, Anna’s continuing interest in science was channelled into botany. She amassed a large collection of pressed plants from specimens growing in the grounds of her home and in the woods of surrounding counties. In 1839, she joined the Botanical Society of London, one of the only scientific societies to admit female members, and became part of a network of other plant-loving friends who would help add to her collection. Around this time, father and daughter followed with interest experiments which would lead to the development of photography. When Herschel shared the details of his new technique, Anna recognised its potential to create images of her collection of algae, whose details she had struggled to capture in her drawings. To one of her botanical friends, she wrote, “The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae … has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype.”

After experimenting with the process, Anna set about making images of her collection with a view to creating a guide to the seaweed of Britain. In 1843, she completed the first volume of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, now regarded as the world’s first photographically illustrated book. Two further volumes followed. To create the approximately fourteen copies of British Algae, Atkins printed some six thousand cyanotype photogram exposures on hand-treated paper, doing the bulk of the work herself. Each booklet was delicately hand-stitched together, bound in bright blue covers. Anna ensured that her achievement came to the attention of prominent scientists of the day; she sent the first copy of each volume to the Royal Society, the second to Herschel, and the third to W.H.F. Talbot, another pioneer in the field of photography. The recipients would have known that the initials ‘A.A.’, with which Anna signed the introduction, stood for Anna Atkins. But, just 50 years later, when Scottish chemist and book collector William Lang, acquired a copy, he was unable to find any clues to the author’s identity. Knowing only that the photographs had been made by a woman, he concluded that the initials stood for ‘Anonymous Amateur’.

Anna Atkins, Ferns Specimen, 1840s, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Google Art Project

In the years following Atkins’ groundbreaking use of cyanotypes to create her botanical albums, the process was largely ignored by artists as silver-based photography became the dominant medium. Cyanotype was used principally to reproduce technical drawings, or blueprints, in the fields of architecture and engineering. Today, we appreciate the inherent beauty of cyanotypes and are drawn to these striking images almost instinctively. Contemporary artists are no less interested than Anna Atkins was in the natural world and in the scientific breakthroughs that have allowed us to study it more closely, as the work of the two Garden Project artists (see HERE) demonstrates. Silvia Infranco looks at centuries’ old medicinal recipes derived from plants and the role of women in preserving the memory of traditional remedies. Cyrielle Gulascy’s fascination with the light emitted by cosmic bodies led her back to John Herschel, who discovered infrared, and his son, William, who demonstrated how UV light can be used to produce otherworldly blue and white images. Like Anna Atkins, she will avail herself of this beautiful process to represent natural phenomena in a way they have not been seen before. MARGIE MACKINNON