Calvert Richard Jones and the daguerreotype of Margam Castle
(Exhibition text by the National Library of Wales, 2000)

The Reverend Calvert Richard Jones of Heathfield House, Swansea, 1802 - 1877

Calvert Richard Jones was born at Verandah, Swansea, on 4th December 1802. His father and grandfather bore the same name. The first Calvert Richard Jones had, through his marriage to Elizabeth Allen, acquired part of the ancient estate of "the Herberts of Swansea" after the death of the last male heir in 1740. The second Calvert Richard Jones gave the town of Swansea the site of the present market. His son was also a benefactor of the town but is best known as a photographic pioneer of great skill and rare artistic vision.

This pencil drawing is believed to be a self-portrait of Calvert Richard Jones made about 1825 with "Wollaston's camera lucida", a device which uses a prism to allow the artist to see the view in front of him at the same time as he is looking at the drawing on the paper below. In October 1833 it was frustration with one of these instruments that led William Henry Fox Talbot to invent the first positive-negative photographic process:

"One of the first days of the month of October 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston's Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success. For when the eye was removed from the prism - in which all looked beautiful - I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.

"After various fruitless attempts, I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion, that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing, which unfortunately I did not possess.

"I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried many years before. This method was, to take a Camera Obscura, and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of transparent tracing paper laid on a pane of glass in the -focus of the instrument. On this paper the objects are distinctly seen ... And this led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature's painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus -fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.

"It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me ... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!

"And why should it not be possible? I asked myself."

From Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, 1844

Three mathematicians

After attending Eton College, the young Calvert Jones went to Oriel College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot of Penrice, near Swansea. Christopher Talbot was a cousin of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the positive-negative photographic process. Calvert Jones and Christopher Talbot shared a passion for the sea and its ships, and formed a close and lasting friendship. Henry Fox Talbot, Christopher Talbot and Calvert Jones all graduated with first class honours in mathematics. In 1824 Christopher Talbot inherited the great estates of Penrice and Margam, and, while still in his twenties, started planning his magnificent new house at Margam. He also fitted out a luxury yacht, the first of many. Calvert Jones was a frequent guest on board and accompanied Talbot on a voyage to the Mediterranean. Christopher Talbot and Henry Fox Talbot were second cousins through their respective fathers - they shared the same great-grandfather, John Ivory Talbot - but they were also first cousins through their mothers: Elizabeth and Mary Fox Strangeways were sisters. After the death of Henry Fox Talbot's father his mother remarried, and Fox Talbot spent much of his youth, particularly school holidays, at Penrice on the Gower Peninsula with his Aunt Mary, her several daughters and her one son, Christopher. Henry's attitude towards Christopher, three years his junior, was protective. Perhaps for that reason he resented Christopher's friend Calvert Jones. From Cowes in 1836 he writes cuttingly "Kit [Christopher Talbot] is here in the Galatea [the current yacht] with his usual satellite Calvert Jones". By that time Fox Talbot had completed his initial photographic discoveries. In The Pencil of Nature he describes how, in the autumn of 1833 on the shores of Lake Como, a "fleeting philosophical vision" became a firm idea, and how in 1834 and 1835 he discovered a method of chemically retaining "nature's painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper".

The Daguerreotype

Fox Talbot kept his work secret until 1839, when Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre announced his own discovery of photography. Fox Talbot rushed to release details of his own findings, which he did at the Royal Society on 31 January 1839. Daguerre's process was completely different from Fox Talbot's positive-negative paper method. It produced an unique positive image on a silvered copper plate using iodine compounds and mercury. The image had a very fine grain and a precious, almost magical appearance on the mirrored surface. The daguerreotype enjoyed enormous and immediate popularity. Fox Talbot's first paper process, photogenic drawing, was barely practical and enjoyed little success, but developments of it would make the daguerreotype obsolete within twenty years. Fox Talbot's discoveries generated much excitement in Wales. In February 1839, when photogenic drawings had just arrived at Penrice, his cousin Charlotte wrote to him saying that "John [Dillwyn] Llewelyn has been making some paper according to your process ... Mr Calvert Jones is quite wild about it". John Dillwyn Llewelyn had married Emma, youngest of the Penrice girls, and would become a distinguished photographer.

Calvert Jones

At this time Calvert Jones, fairly recently married, seems to have been living the life of a leisured gentleman. Although he was an ordained clergyman he held a parish only briefly. In 1829 he had been installed as vicar of Roath, Cardiff, and Rector of Loughor, near Swansea, but he surrendered Loughor in favour of his brother Henry Wyndham Jones in 1836 and gave up Roath in 1839. From a distance his life seems to have been enviably tranquil and unstressed: he was the heir of a good estate and could afford to devote his days to music, painting and the arts. As a mathematician he would have taken an interest in "natural philosophy" but there is no indication that he intended to employ his scientific interests in any practical sense, indeed, his decision to become a clergyman suggests a lack of enthusiasm for business or industry. He seems to have had little to show for his thirty-six years apart from a number of sketchbooks filled with fine watercolours and drawings mainly of marine subjects seen at harbours between Swansea and the Mediterranean. But the discovery of photography seems to transform him. Not only did he go "quite wild about it" on its first announcement, but for the next eight years he would pursue the goal of photographic excellence with great vigour and enormous persistence.

The Daguerreotype of Margam Castle

On the announcement of Fox Talbot's discoveries, Calvert Jones immediately began his own experiments and made arrangements to meet Fox Talbot. He took to the daguerreotype, a laborious and expensive process, at once, and the wholeplate daguerreotype of Margam Castle (the only daguerreotype by Calvert Jones known to have survived) shows that by March 1841 he had thoroughly mastered the technique and was able to produce an image of the highest quality. The photograph, taken when Margam Castle was still unfinished, is believed to have been a gift from the photographer to his friend Christopher Talbot, builder of Margam Castle, and to have hung at the Castle for many years.

Calotypes

By 1841 Fox Talbot had devised an improved positive-negative process, the "calotype", which involved the development of a latent image. This extra step allowed much shorter exposures and made the process far more practical. At first Calvert Jones (like most other users) found the calotype unreliable and wrote frequently to Fox Talbot asking for guidance in resolving a series of frustrating difficulties. Talbot, a secretive man, was reticent. In 1843 Calvert Jones went to meet Hippolyte Bayard in Paris. Bayard had independently discovered a method of forming a positive image on paper and Calvert Jones reported back to Talbot. Gradually, showing immense patience, tenacity and tact, Jones overcame Talbot's reserve. In 1845 the two joined together on photographic excursions to York, Bristol and Devon and Calvert Jones learnt Talbot's hidden photographic secrets. He became converted to the calotype and abandoned the daguerreotype. By December 1845 he had joined Christopher Talbot in Malta, where Talbot had taken his dying wife in the hope that the climate would suit her. Calvert Jones took calotypes in Malta and, later in 1846, in Italy, and sent the negatives back to England to be printed and sold by Fox Talbot's photographic establishment at Reading.

Achievement

The calotypes taken on this European tour and those taken later in Wales, England and Ireland are Calvert Jones's best-known work. They are very carefully composed, showing the eye and judgement of a practised artist. But Jones was not afraid to take chances with composition, and, unrestrained by any conventional wisdom of photographic practice, he freely experimented and explored the possibilities of the camera. His best pictures are adventurous, striking and powerful. One prominent critic judges them to be "among the finest and most imaginative images made in the nineteenth century... asking questions pertaining to life and death, time and motion".

By 1847 Calvert Jones had become Fox Talbot's closest photographic collaborator. Talbot wrote warmly of his "steady friend" Jones. He listened to his counsel on matters of business and finally invited him to manage his new photographic studio in Regent Street. Jones refused. His father had died in April 1847 leaving him the estate, but directing trustees to make cash bequests amounting to £15,000. It seems Jones was now forced to turn his attention to estate business and in particular to raising this large sum of money. In the 1850s he would develop that part of the estate which now lies near the centre of Swansea. Christopher Talbot, too, had become increasingly involved in business affairs, after the death of his wife in 1846. Both men would in future have less time for photography than they did in the early 1840s, when all photography was new. Nevertheless, Calvert Jones remained involved with photography into the 1850s and afterwards, when the daguerreotype and calotype had both been outmoded.

The paintings and drawings of the 1830s show Calvert Jones to have been a talented artist and a fine watercolourist. His careful drawings show a strong sense of colour and form, and a great concern for correct perspective "even if judged by the rules of Euclid". His artist's eye was conditioned by the training of a mathematician. It is not so surprising that such a man should take eagerly to a medium that gave perfect representation of nature. "Nature's painting" was perfection itself, "equal to one of M. Angelo's drawings" and "wonderfully perfect and beautiful". Jones's knowledge of mathematics and science also enabled him to undertake the practical work of photography in which he showed such determination. Yet representation alone was not his aim, but only a means to an end - the creation of art. The scientific understanding and practical skills would be wasted without the "artistical knowledge and tact". Calvert Jones was an artist before he was a photographer and regarded photography primarily as a means of artistic expression. His achievement was to express his artistic vision through the medium of photography. His work was neglected for a hundred years after his death. Only now are we beginning to recognise his genius.