This book presents 47 photographs, which were all taken in 1859 by Philip Henry Delamotte and showed the interior of the Crystal Palace after it had been rebuilt in Sydenham, London and before it was destroyed for the first time by fire in 1866. These photographs are now housed in English Heritage's photographic archive, the National Monuments Record. All 47 photographs are beautifully reproduced in this book, as well as shots of the building in its original Hyde Park site where it was built for the great exhibition of 1851. Also included are views of the Crystal Palace when it was rebuilt after the 1866 fire and then when it was destroyed again by fire in 1936. The book also tells the story of this legendary Victorian pleasure dome and its many incarnations. Much of our previous knowledge of this important building and its contents came almost entirely from engravings. The reproduction of these high quality original photographs allows, for the first time, a much fuller appreciation of one of the most important architectural and cultural features of mid-Victorian England, which in its heyday was visited by many millions of people.

The marble halls of the British Museum might seem the natural habitat for classical sculpture, but in the nineteenth century its sombre displays were far from being the only place that people encountered antiquities. From 1854, a rival collection of classical sculpture, comprising plaster casts from major European museums and scaled down architectural features, was on show in the South London suburb of Sydenham, in the Crystal Palace which had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. By the late 1850s, two million visitors were passing through the glass doors of the Sydenham Crystal Palace each year, more than twice as many as recorded at the British Museum. Many more people, and from a greater variety of social strata, saw the painted cast of the Parthenon frieze in Sydenham than the original in Bloomsbury. Utilizing an extensive variety of archival material, including diaries, scrapbooks and photographs, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace evokes visitor experiences at Sydenham, and examines the discussion that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in modern Britain, assessing how classical art figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, class and gender, and race and imperialism.

Presents the history of paleoart from 1830-1990. These are not cave paintings produced thousands of years ago, but modern visions of prehistory: stunning paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, mosaics, and murals that mingle scientific fact with unbridled fantasy

Built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace originally graced London's Hyde Park with Joseph Paxton's remarkable geometric design and groundbreaking use of glass elements, prefiguring the modern movement in architecture. After the exhibition a group of bankers, railway directors, and men of influence moved the structure to a new site in south London, rebuilt it to an even grander scale, and set about its promotion as a "palace for the multitude." Here were exhibitions, concerts, and spectaculars to fill a splendid day out for Londoners of all classes and interests. Filled with plaster casts of great art treasures, life-sized models of dinosaurs, waterworks, and gardens, the Crystal Palace became a center of both education and entertainment from the Victorian era through its destruction by fire in1936. Copublished with C. Hurst & Co., London Wisconsin edition for sale only in North and South America, U.S. territories and dependencies, and the Philippines.

Photography emerged in 1839 in two forms simultaneously. In France, Louis Daguerre produced photographs on silvered sheets of copper, while in Great Britain, William Henry Fox Talbot put forward a method of capturing an image on ordinary writing paper treated with chemicals. Talbot’s invention, a paper negative from which any number of positive prints could be made, became the progenitor of virtually all photography carried out before the digital age. Talbot named his perfected invention "calotype," a term based on the Greek word for beauty. Calotypes were characterized by a capacity for subtle tonal distinctions, massing of light and shadow, and softness of detail. In the 1840s, amateur photographers in Britain responded with enthusiasm to the challenges posed by the new medium. Their subjects were wide-ranging, including landscapes and nature studies, architecture, and portraits. Glass-negative photography, which appeared in 1851, was based on the same principles as the paper negative but yielded a sharper picture, and quickly gained popularity. Despite the rise of glass negatives in commercial photography, many gentlemen of leisure and learning continued to use paper negatives into the 1850s and 1860s. These amateurs did not seek the widespread distribution and international reputation pursued by their commercial counterparts, nearly all of whom favored glass negatives. As a result, many of these calotype works were produced in a small number of prints for friends and fellow photographers or for a family album. This richly illustrated, landmark publication tells the first full history of the calotype, embedding it in the context of Britain’s changing fortunes, intricate class structure, ever-growing industrialization, and the new spirit under Queen Victoria. Of the 118 early photographs presented here in meticulously printed plates, many have never before been published or exhibited.