This chapter explores the relationship between sketching, drawing, painting and photography in north-west Italy. The correspondence between the diplomat William Henry Strangways and his nephew Henry Fox Talbot is used to examine their mutual interests in landscapes, botany and gardening. This fascination led Fox Talbot, unhappy with his drawings of Lake Como in 1833, to investigate the use of light-sensitive paper to make effective landscapes. We go on to explore both the development of photography in Italy and different types and examples of landscape photography. We examine the importance of photography in the invention of the idea of Riviera through the works of Alfredo Noack and the types of scene produced by others, such as Ezio Benigni and a range of British photographers.

Fox Talbot And The Idea Of Natural Pictures

It is well established that the idea of photography struck Henry Fox Talbot while staying at a villa overlooking Lake Como early in October 1833, and he outlines the process carefully in his book The Pencil of Nature, published ten years later. He describes how he was ‘amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success.’ William Wollaston had patented his camera lucida in 1806 and a modified form was introduced by Giovanni Battista Amici in 1819. In 1829 the naval officer and travel writer Basil Hall enthused on its benefits for the traveller. He argued that the drawings it produced had ‘the character of truth’ conveyed by its ‘mechanical accuracy’ and that this was true ‘even in hands but little familiar with the management of the pencil’. Hall, making use of his experience in North America, went so far as to argue that ‘with his Sketch Book in one pocket, the Camera Lucida in the other … the amateur may rove where he pleases, possessed of a magical secret for recording the features of Nature with ease and fidelity … .’

But in 1833 Fox Talbot found the practical difficulties in using the camera lucida to be insuperable.