Bonneville near Geneva on the Road to Chamonix

Prior to the invention of photography, drawing offered the most precise and immediate way for artists to visualize their ideas and document their experiences. In 1821 Sir John Herschel, a highly-accomplished British scientist, made a grand tour of Europe and recorded his observations of geographical and geological formations with the aid of a drawing tool called the camera lucida. Herschel looked at nature through this optical device and drew with his pencil in close-valued shades of graphite gray that anticipated photographs in composition and tonal scale. He rendered the mountains near Geneva, Switzerland with the same attention to detail that he gave to a tree in the foreground. By doing so, he achieved a uniform field of focus that is closer to photographic vision than it is to the selective focus of the unaided eye.

Adapted from getty.edu, Interpretive Content Department, 2008; and Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 4, © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.