An "Opalotype" of Everett and Ruth Carpenter -- Friday Fotos (October 17, 2014)

Among the items just recently discovered by my sister, is an old frame containing the above photograph of our maternal grandfather and his older sister. The photograph is about 8 inches by 10 inches and was held inside a substantial wooden frame with a sheet of thin wood covering the back of the frame rather than paper or cardboard.

I was very curious when my mother showed me the frame and the photograph this past weekend, because her father (the boy at left in the photograph) was born in 1891 and his older sister was born in 1889.  The photograph was larger than any others of early 1890s vintage that I had seen in our family collection and I had a suspicion that it was not a photograph on paper. When I carefully removed the thin wood backing and extracted the photograph, my suspicions were confirmed when we discovered that the photograph was on a thin sheet of milk-white glass rather than paper. This helped to explain why it was secured in the back of the frame by a thin wooden sheet -- it was to protect the portrait-on-glass against breakage.

My grandfather, Everett Shearman Carpenter, is on the left in the photograph.  He was born on February 22, 1891in Albion (Cumberland), Rhode Island.  His older sister, Ruth Ann Carpenter, is on the right and she was born July 21, 1889 in Providence, Rhode Island.

The portrait of my grandfather and his sister is what is known as an "opalotype" or "milk glass positive."  The opalotype technique was patented in 1857 by Glover and Bold of Liverpool, England. It was a known photographic technique into the 1930s, but was almost entirely supplanted by paper photographs by then. It is an "alternative photographic technique" now and, as Wikipedia puts it, the practice  is limited now to "a small number of dedicated artists." 

To learn a little more about "milk glass positives" and opalotypes, read the short Wikipedia stub here and use the links there to see other examples of the technique. You can also see more examples by searching "opalotype" at Google images. 

And finally, talking about serendipity . . . last week UpFront With NGS posted about a free online book for telling the difference among daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes. The link to the book proved of timely interest and use when days later I made the discovery of an opalotype in our family photograph collection.  If you have not already checked out the online book, here is the link to the post again.

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Scan from the original opalotype portrait in the author's family collection.

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Copyright 2014, John D. Tew

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