The picture above depicts Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, higher recognized within the English-speaking world as Leo Tolstoy. It dates from 1908, when he had almost all his work behind him: the most important novels Warfare and Peace and Anna Karenina, in fact, but in addition the acclaimed late ebook The Demise of Ivan Ilyich. His personal loss of life, in actual fact, lay not rather more than two years earlier than him. (See footage of the ultimate days of his life right here.) This didn’t supply a lot of a window of alternative to the chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, who had not too long ago developed a images course of that would seize the good man of letters in “true colour” — and who understood that such a portrait would rating a promotional coup for his innovation.
“After a few years of labor, I’ve now achieved wonderful leads to producing correct colours,” Prokudin-Gorsky wrote to Tolstoy early that very same 12 months. “My coloured projections are recognized in each Europe and in Russia. Now that my methodology of images requires not more than 1 to three seconds, I’ll permit myself to ask your permission to go to for one or two days (preserving in thoughts the state of your well being and climate) with a purpose to take a number of colour images of you and your partner.” After receiving that permission, Prokudin-Gorsky spent two days at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s household property, the place he took colour footage of not simply the person himself however his working quarters and the encircling grounds.
“A couple of months later, in its August 1908 concern, The Proceedings of the Russian Technical Society ran the next announcement describing ‘the primary Russian colour photoportrait,’ a colour {photograph} of L. N. Tolstoy,” in line with Tolstoy Research Journal. The ensuing fame drew Prokudin-Gorsky an invite to point out his work to Tsar Nicholas II, who subsequently furnished him with the sources to spend ten years photographically documenting Russia in colour. “To this present day, no person is aware of precisely what digicam Prokudin-Gorsky used,” writes Kai Bernau at Phrases that Work, “but it surely was seemingly a big wood digicam with a particular holder for a sliding glass destructive plate, taking three sequential monochrome images, every by way of a distinct coloured filter.” This seems to be a technological descendant of the method developed within the early eighteen-sixties by Scottish physicist-poet James Clerk Maxwell, creator of the primary colour {photograph} in historical past.
To view that {photograph}, Maxwell “projected the three slides utilizing three totally different projectors, every affixed with the identical colour filter that had been used to supply the slide.” Prokudin-Gorsky, too, needed to venture his photographs, although he did later make colour prints; “he additionally printed it, in vital numbers, as a collectible postcard,” says Tolstoy Research Journal, including that the model seen here’s a scan of 1 such postcard. “How precisely a lithographed copy just like the one above of Tolstoy represents the ‘actual’ colours of Prokudin-Gorsky’s unique projected picture is debatable”; the essential technological distinction between “subtractive” lithography and “additive’ projection implies that we will’t be seeing fairly the identical image of Tolstoy that the Tsar did — however then, it’s a superb a likeness of him as we’re ever going to get.
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The Very Final Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured on Video
Tsarist Russia Involves Life in Vivid Colour Pictures Taken Circa 1905-1915
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embody the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.