Shimla
1865
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1865
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Shimla is a 1865 by Dr. John Murray, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet hillside town at dusk, houses stacked like blocks, smoke curling from chimneys. This isn’t a painting—it’s an early photograph. Murray used paper negatives, waxed to let light through, then printed the image in chemical baths. The soft focus and grainy texture feel almost modern, but this was made in 1865, long before color film. If you like how light plays in old photos, look up *chiaroscuro*.
Before digital photography, most cameras yielded a negative, an image in which the tones are the reverse of those in the original subject. Early photographers shot on sheets of paper that were waxed to make them more translucent, then coated with a light-sensitive solution and exposed in the camera. To create a positive image, light was passed through the negative onto light-sensitive paper, which was developed in a series of chemical baths to create the print.
Simla, a town in the Himalayan foothills, became the summer capital of British colonial India in 1864.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Dr. John Murray (1809–1898) was a Scottish artist.
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