Street scene with raised pavement

Street scene with steps to the porch of a residential building on the right. To the left, railings along the edge of a raised pavement fall steeply down a hill of seventeenth and eighteenth century houses. There is fading to the left (road side) and to the corners of the image.

Calvert Richard Jones was one of the first to learn of W.H. F Talbot's photographic discoveries in the late 1830s through Talbot's cousin and friends who lived near to Jones in South Wales. Jones subsequently became one of the few Britons to produced a substantial body of calotypes in Britain and abroad. His work stands out in the early development of photography because of his ability to fuse his technical skill with the influence of his training as a watercolorist.
This photograph is one of a two part panorama showing both sides of a steep cobbled street with a commanding view over the centre of Bristol. It was a view that Calvert Jones may already have seen depicted in another medium. Samuel Jackson, an eminent watercolorist of the Bristol School of Artists, painted Bristol from St Michael's Hill in 1824 (Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery).

Some timber framed houses (demolished 1868) survived on St Michael's Hill, in the photograph they are adjacent to St. Michael's, which is hidden by the trees in the background of this photograph. The other residential buildings are mainly from eighteenth century.

This photograph is one of a two part panorama showing both sides of a steep cobbled street with a commanding view over the centre of Bristol. It is important as an early panorama made by the calotype process -a paper negative process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839.

Calvert Jones, who took this photograph, was introduced to photography by a cousin of Talbot and by close friends, who lived near to Jones in South Wales. Jones' work stands out in the early development of photography because of his ability to fuse his new skill in photography with his experience as a watercolorist. He may have seen a watercolour of this view painted by Samuel Jackson of the Bristol School of Artists.

PH.64-1983