Nature's Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain by Anne Helmreich (review)

Anne Helmreich's important new book posits that "art was profoundly shaped by radical changes in science and its discourses over the course of the long-nineteenth century" (2). Case studies of select photographers and painters recognized for pursuing new directions in representation reveal how scientific discovery changed the direction of British landscape art. A substantive introduction adeptly provides scholars and general readers alike with the necessary background and cultural context surrounding the often fierce debates that took place in the British art world. Over the course of four chapters and a brief conclusion, Helmreich rethinks the evolution of British modernism by considering how "artists sought to reinvigorate their practice through lessons derived from science" (5). This approach challenges received histories of art and upends hierarchies of value that place science over art, or painting over photography.

Since artist treatises, photographic studies, and scientific discoveries were often first published in the periodical press, Helmreich's extensive research integrates a wide range of sources. This impressive study draws on artists' speeches published in the Times and treatises from familiar periodicals devoted to British painting, including the Germ, Art Journal, and Contemporary Review. She also incorporates articles by painters such as John Brett in Nature and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as articles by photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot in the Literary Gazette and Athenaeum. Her research pays particular attention to the ways Victorian periodicals circulated discoveries in science and photography, as well as their widespread attention to new developments in the world of art. One of the real pleasures of this work is the opportunity to follow Helmreich's connections between such varied publications as the Journal of the Camera Club, Magazine of Art, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and to trace how she situates each journal within the disciplines. Furthermore, an abundance of color reproductions and numerous examples of early photography are most welcome and exciting. Helmreich has produced a vibrant study that is of great interest to the entire nineteenth-century studies community.

Chapter one, "Truth to Nature and the 'Innocent Eye,'" puts William Henry Fox Talbot's early work in photography in conversation with the artwork of Pre-Raphaelite mentor Ford Madox Brown to demonstrate how photographers and artists "aimed to define pictorial representation for the modern age" (23). Helmreich's overview of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood does not center on familiar protagonists or narratives. Instead, she brilliantly explores the intersections between photography, art, and science, specifically geology, to argue that the "relationship between painting and photography . . . was configured not by influence but by shared interests and intersecting discourses shaped by the rise of scientific knowledge" (38). Thus, the Pre-Raphaelite attention to realistic representations of nature and its emphasis on specific detail, as demonstrated in landscapes by John Brett, William Dyce, and William Holman Hunt, emerged not, as has been argued, because of the camera but as a reflection of larger cultural forces that valued close visual observation and inductive philosophy. Therefore, photography and painting, like science, participated in the process of "knowledge formation" (38). Close readings of paintings and photographs reveal artists' attention to perception and their desire to follow John Ruskin's advice to render with precision every aspect of nature. Ruskin, Helmreich writes, was "encourag[ing] the young artists he supported to participate in the increasingly visible and culturally significant practice of scientific observation" (45). Ultimately, painters and photographers determined that an unrelenting emphasis on truth to nature was confining and that images captured via mechanical and chemical processes or by paint and the human hand must be mediated by the unscientific and susceptible human eye. As a result, Helmreich concludes, photographers realized they could not escape the confines of the "picturesque" (70), and painters such as William Holman Hunt determined that realistic representation was not the sole purpose of art; rather, a realistic...