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Hand-colouring (or hand-coloring) refers to any method of manually adding colour to a
monochrome photograph Monochrome photography is photography where each position on an image can record and show a different ''amount'' of light, but not a different hue. It includes all forms of black-and-white photography, which produce images containing shades o ...
, generally either to heighten the realism of the image or for artistic purposes. Hand-colouring is also known as hand painting or overpainting. Typically,
watercolours Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (British English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin ''aqua'' "water"), is a painting method”Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to ...
,
oils An oil is any nonpolar chemical substance that is composed primarily of hydrocarbons and is hydrophobic (does not mix with water) & lipophilic (mixes with other oils). Oils are usually flammable and surface active. Most oils are unsaturat ...
,
crayons A crayon (or wax pastel) is a stick of pigmented wax used for writing or drawing. Wax crayons differ from pastels, in which the pigment is mixed with a dry binder such as gum arabic, and from oil pastels, where the binder is a mixture of wa ...
or
pastels A pastel () is an art medium in a variety of forms including a stick, a square a pebble or a pan of color; though other forms are possible; they consist of powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those us ...
, and other
paint Paint is any pigmented liquid, liquefiable, or solid mastic composition that, after application to a substrate in a thin layer, converts to a solid film. It is most commonly used to protect, color, or provide texture. Paint can be made in many ...
s or
dye A dye is a colored substance that chemically bonds to the substrate to which it is being applied. This distinguishes dyes from pigments which do not chemically bind to the material they color. Dye is generally applied in an aqueous solution and ...
s are applied to the image surface using
brush A brush is a common tool with bristles, wire or other filaments. It generally consists of a handle or block to which filaments are affixed in either a parallel or perpendicular orientation, depending on the way the brush is to be gripped duri ...
es, fingers,
cotton swab Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus ''Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor perce ...
s or
airbrush An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays various media, most often paint but also ink and dye, and foundation. Spray painting developed from the airbrush and is considered to employ a type of airbrush. Histor ...
es. Hand-coloured photographs were most popular in the mid- to late-19th century before the invention of
colour photography Color photography is photography that uses media capable of capturing and reproducing colors. By contrast, black-and-white or gray-monochrome photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media capable only of ...
and some firms specialised in producing hand-coloured photographs.


History


Pre-1900

Monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochr ...
(black and white)
photography Photography is the visual art, art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It i ...
was first exemplified by the
daguerreotype Daguerreotype (; french: daguerréotype) was the first publicly available photographic process; it was widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process. Invented by Louis Daguerre ...
in 1839 and later improved by other methods including:
calotype Calotype or talbotype is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide. Paper texture effects in calotype photography limit the ability of this early process to record low ...
,
ambrotype The ambrotype (from grc, ἀμβροτός — “immortal”, and  — “impression”) also known as a collodion positive in the UK, is a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. Like a pr ...
,
tintype A tintype, also known as a melainotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. Tintypes enjoyed their w ...
,
albumen print The albumen print, also called albumen silver print, was published in January 1847 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, and was the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative. It ...
and
gelatin silver print The gelatin silver process is the most commonly used chemical process in black-and-white photography, and is the fundamental chemical process for modern analog color photography. As such, films and printing papers available for analog photography ...
. The majority of photography remained monochrome until the mid-20th century, although experiments were producing
colour photography Color photography is photography that uses media capable of capturing and reproducing colors. By contrast, black-and-white or gray-monochrome photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media capable only of ...
as early as 1855 and some photographic processes produced images with an inherent overall colour like the blue of
cyanotype The cyanotype (from Ancient Greek κυάνεος - ''kuáneos'', “dark blue” + τύπος - ''túpos'', “mark, impression, type”) is a slow-reacting, economical photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet ...
s. In an attempt to create more realistic images, photographers and artists would hand-colour monochrome photographs. The first hand-coloured daguerreotypes are attributed to
Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri *Swiss, North Carolina * Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses * Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internati ...
painter and printmaker
Johann Baptist Isenring Johann Baptist Isenring (12 May 1796, Lütisburg - 9 April 1860, St. Gallen) was a Swiss landscape painter and printer. He was also the first Daguerrotypist in Switzerland. Life and work As a boy, he completed a carpentry apprenticeship in Z� ...
, who used a mixture of
gum arabic Gum arabic, also known as gum sudani, acacia gum, Arabic gum, gum acacia, acacia, Senegal gum, Indian gum, and by other names, is a natural gum originally consisting of the hardened sap of two species of the ''Acacia'' tree, ''Senegalia se ...
and
pigment A pigment is a colored material that is completely or nearly insoluble in water. In contrast, dyes are typically soluble, at least at some stage in their use. Generally dyes are often organic compounds whereas pigments are often inorganic comp ...
s to colour daguerreotypes soon after their invention in 1839. Coloured powder was fixed on the delicate surface of the daguerreotype by the application of heat. Variations of this technique were patented in
England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...
by Richard Beard in 1842 and in
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan ar ...
by Étienne Lecchi in 1842 and Léotard de Leuze in 1845. Later, hand-colouring was used with successive photographic innovations, from albumen and gelatin silver prints to
lantern slides The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name , is an early type of image projector that used pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates (usually made of glass), one or more lenses, and a light source. Because a sin ...
and transparency photography. Parallel efforts to produce coloured photographic images affected the popularity of hand-colouring. In 1842
Daniel Davis Jr. Daniel Davis Jr. (February 8, 1813 – March 22, 1887) was an American science instrument maker, electrical engineer, mechanic, photographer, daguerreotypist and ambrotypist. Through the course of his work he became known for his practical kn ...
patented a method for colouring daguerreotypes through
electroplating Electroplating, also known as electrochemical deposition or electrodeposition, is a process for producing a metal coating on a solid substrate through the redox, reduction of cations of that metal by means of a direct current, direct electric cur ...
, and his work was refined by Warren Thompson the following year. The results of the work of Davis and Thompson were only partially successful in creating colour photographs and the electroplating method was soon abandoned. In 1850 Levi L. Hill announced his invention of a process of daguerreotyping in natural colours in his ''Treatise on Daguerreotype''. Sales of conventional uncoloured and hand-coloured daguerreotypes fell in anticipation of this new technology. Hill delayed publication of the details of his process for several years, however, and his claims soon came to be considered fraudulent. When he finally did publish his treatise in 1856, the process – whether bona fide or not – was certainly impractical and dangerous. With the advent of photographic emulsions on glass came the potential to make enlargements from them, but for the lack of a sufficiently strong light source to project them on to the receiving emulsion as prints on paper, canvas or other supports. The
solar camera The solar camera, or solar enlarger, is an ancestor of the darkroom enlarger, and was used in the mid-to-late 19th century to make photographic enlargements from negatives. Other uses The name ''Solar'' was registered as the brand of an unrel ...
, employing the focussed light of the sun, addressed the problem in a repurposing of the solar microscope by American portrait artist David Acheson Woodward in 1857, and others, before being superseded by enlargers employing artificial light sources from the 1880s. Life-size portraits made by this means were hand coloured in crayon or overpainted in oils and were popular into the 1910s. Hand-colouring remained the easiest and most effective method to produce full-colour photographic images until the mid-20th century when American
Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...
introduced
Kodachrome Kodachrome is the brand name for a color reversal film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935. It was one of the first successful color materials and was used for both cinematography and still photography. For many years Kodachrome was widely used ...
colour film.


Japanese hand-coloured photographs (circa 1860–1899)

Though the hand-colouring of photographs was introduced in
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...
, the technique gained considerable popularity in Japan, where the practice became a respected and refined art form beginning in the 1860s. It is possible that photographer Charles Parker and his artist partner William Parke Andrew were the first to produce such works in Japan, but the first to consistently employ hand-colouring in the country were the photographer
Felice Beato Felice Beato (1832 – 29 January 1909), also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, ...
and his partner, ''The Illustrated London News'' artist and colourist
Charles Wirgman Charles Wirgman (31 August 1832 - 8 February 1891) was an English artist and cartoonist, the creator of the '' Japan Punch'' and illustrator in China and Meiji period-Japan for the ''Illustrated London News''. Wirgman was the eldest son of Ferd ...
.Henisch. (1996). p. 201. In Beato's studio the refined skills of
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly i