Many Historic and Rare Images Added to New Image Galleries

Thanks to being ill at home with a bad cold, I have finally had the opportunity to go through all the scans that the Fund made of the many rare and extraordinary images of Wallace, his family, friends, colleagues and houses, which his grandson John discovered in his attic about one year ago (see http://wallacefund.info/extraordinary-collection-wallace-photographs-discovered and http://wallacefund.info/more-previously-unknown-photos-r-wallace). I have now produced small versions of of these images (at least all of those with identifiable subjects) and have put them into the Fund's new image galleries which you can access here:- http://picasaweb.google.com/WallaceMemorialFund

Our new image galleries now contain the most comprehensive set of historic Wallace-related images ever assembled and we hope you enjoy looking through them! Quite a number of the images have never been made publically available before and many were previously only known from poor quality versions published in books. I should add that not all of these images are from John's recent find; quite a large number (especially in the 'Images of Wallace' gallery) are from other sources. I think that the 'Images of Wallace' gallery now contains nearly all known images of Wallace. If you know of any I've missed then I would be extremely grateful if you let me know about them (blaberus1@ntlworld.com). Eventually I hope to publish a catalogue of the know photos of Wallace with my colleague Charles Smith.

I have enjoyed studying the photos and trying to work out the names of the photographers and other details about them, often piecing this information together from a variety of different sources (e.g the photographer might be mentioned when an image was first published). I also found it interesting that the images (especially those of Wallace) span most of the history of (non-digital) photography - from the first commercially available photographic prints (Daguerreotypes), through ambrotypes, tintypes, carte de visites, cabinet cards, and then on to more familiar types of prints on thicker photographic paper. Before I started my investigations I had thought that carte de visites, cabinet cards and postcards where produced in large quantities for sale and/or to give away. However, I have discovered that these were simply the standard formats for printed images of their time, so even 'one off' images were printed in these formats (for more info. see http://www.authentichistory.com/1865-1897/technology/photography/index.html and http://www.phototree.com/history.htm).