Figure 1.--This opalotype portrait is of a boy about 5 years old. We think he was from North Carloina. He is dressed in a ruffled blouse, knee pants, and ankle boots. When the photograph was found it was wrapped in handkerchief with a little note saying, "my nephew Thomas - 1863". The boy to us seems dressed more like the 1890s. The portrait measures 3-1/4" x 4-1/4" and is signed in lower right corner T. LANOERS. A reader writes, "The big-coolr blouse and the black stockings definited indicate that this was was not a 1860s portrait, more likesly as you suggest, the 1890s."

Opalotype (also spelled opaltype) was another early photographic process. The names derives from a type of white, translucent glass, commonly called milk glass. The opalotype was sometimes called milk glass positives. There were two types of opalotypes. The first was transferring a carbon print onto glass. A similar process was used on inexpensice decorated pottery. The second process used a negative to expose a glass sheet which has been sensatized by a photographic emulsion. Opalotypists used wet collodion and silver gelatin. It was essentially a glass plate used like a sheet of photographic paper. Often they were colorized through hand tinting, giving a more pleasing effect than a black-and-white image. There were also painting. The opalotype gave something like the impression of ivory minatures which were popular in the 18th and early-19th centuries before the development of photography. Glover and Bold of Liverpool developed and patented the process (1857). The process does not appear to have been very popular. We have not found mkany examples in the photigraophic record. One example is an unidentified American boy, priobanly in the early-1860s. The opalotype process may have been more popular in Britain than America. I'm not sure about the continent. We do not note very many examples in the photographic record, in comparison to the huge number of CDVs and cabinent cards. A factor may have been cost. The process was, however, persued into the 20th century. We note very few examples after the 1920s.

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Created: 11:50 PM 12/16/2007
Last updated: 11:10 PM 4/24/2011