Corrine Montague Mustin Murray Cyanotype Collection

Corrine Montague Mustin Murray Cyanotype Collection

Cyanotypes

Williamsburg (Va.) - Photographs

Williamsburg (Va.) - Buildings, structures, etc.

Richmond (Va.) - Photographs

Cyanotypes are a distinctive photographic process characterized by a Prussian blue hue that date back to 1842, when Sir John Herschel perfected this method of easily producing a reproduction using plain paper. A piece of paper coated with a light sensitive combination of iron salt, ammonium ferric citrate, and potassium ferricyanide, when exposed to light, turned blue. When a photographer placed a negative on top of the paper and placed it in the light, a positive image would appear on the paper and this image would be fixed through a wash to create a cyan image on a white background. Cyanotypes did not become a common photographic medium until the period between the late 1880s-1920 and tended to be used more often for landscape and architectural views since the bright uniform blue hue did not appeal to many as a format for portraits. Architectural blueprints are created using a similar process where ferric ammonium citrate is used to sensitize the paper and then it is exposed to light and put through a wash to create a design consisting of white lines exposed on a Prussian blue background.

The Rockefeller Library holds several collections with examples of the cyanotype medium during its widespread use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These offer a glimpse into Williamsburg just prior to the launch of several projects to save historic properties around the town. The Corrine Montague Mustin Murray Cyanotype Collection, AV2012.9, consists entirely of cyanotypes depicting views of Williamsburg, Richmond, and the James River. Dating to circa 1903, they depict many of the historic structures still extant in Williamsburg, as well as the Market Square/Courthouse Green area and Capitol area before many early twentieth-century businesses and residences were erected. Bruton Parish Church welcomed Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin as rector in 1903 and he led a campaign for funds to help restore the church to its eighteenth-century appearance. During this period, town residents also started to organize through such groups as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, co-founded in 1889 by Cynthia Beverley Tucker Coleman and Mary Jeffrey Galt, to rescue and preserve other deteriorating structures and to begin some early excavation activities, such as uncovering and capping the foundations of the Capitol in 1904.

The thirty-five cyanotypes comprising this collection consist of landscape scenes and structures in Williamsburg, Richmond, and along the James River, Virginia collected by Corrine Montague Mustin Murray.

Unknown

Circa 1903

35 cyanotypes

Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation