Photochrom Postcards From Ireland Showing Life In The 1890s
These colorful photographs of Ireland were created as souvenirs for tourists and postcards utilising a method known as Photochrom (or Photochrom, Fotochrom, Photochrome, or the Aäc process).
The assortment includes the major cities of Dublin, Belfast, Cork, and Waterford, as well as the primary tourist sights of that era.
The photochrom technique is an early colour photography process that was used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It allowed black-and-white photographic negatives to be printed in colour, creating vibrant, realistic-looking images. Here's how it works:
Starting Point - Black and White Negative: The process begins with a black-and-white photographic negative.
Lithographic Stones: The technique uses multiple lithographic stones, usually between six and fifteen, each inked with a different colour. The stones are prepared to correspond to different areas of the image based on shades and textures.
Colour Application: Each stone is inked with a specific colour of ink, and the image is built up through successive applications of ink. This is a complex and labour-intensive process since each stone must be carefully aligned (registered) to match the image perfectly.
Finished Product: The final result is a colour image that resembles a colour photograph but is technically a photomechanical print. The colours are vivid and lifelike, though they are not true photographic colours but are created through a printing process.
Developed in the 1880s, by Hans Jakob Schmid, working for the Swiss printing company Orell Füssli, the method gained widespread popularity in the 1890s.
Perhaps most intriguing is the enduring nature of these images; cityscapes and renowned tourist attractions from the 1890s, like The Cliffs of Moher and The Giant’s Causeway, remain instantly recognizable and continue to attract visitors to this day.
Between 1851 and 1911 the urban proportion of Ireland’s ever-declining population doubled. Even so, on the eve of World War I, only one-third of the people lived in towns with more than two thousand inhabitants.
Farming still accounted for the majority of occupied men and overall, the Irish economy had retained its rural character to a remarkable degree.
This anomaly was a by-product of massive emigration, which had enabled up to half of each generation to urbanize itself overseas rather than at home.
Rural class structure lost much of its top as well as its bottom layer during the later nineteenth century. Tenant agitation, legislation, and economic setbacks accomplished what the Great Famine had failed to achieve, the emasculation of the landlord class.
Though retaining their home farms and leaseholds, most landlords had begun to sell tenanted farms to the occupiers before 1914.
In most of Ireland, the potato, far from being discredited, remained the major staple of the diet, along with buttermilk and “kitchen” in the form of salted herring. The meat was seldom eaten except at festivals.
The enduring preference for potatoes reflected justified faith in their nutritional value as well as taste and prevailed despite the fact that unblighted potatoes were now much more expensive to grow or buy.
By the late nineteenth century, imported foods and home-produced meats were more widely disseminated, yet the rural diet remained astonishingly simple and healthy.
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