Getty Museum

Bonneville near Geneva on the Road to Chamonix

Date

August 13, 1821

Medium

Graphite drawing made with the aid of a camera lucida

Culture

British

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

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