The ferrotype and how to make it - The Grian Press

126 THE FERROTYPE.
been merely doing that which untaught minds
and hands had prepared for him to do. He had
seized on, at our bidding, all the prominence and
all that obtruded itself upon the first sight, and
had very faithfully portrayed it on our silver
mirror. But at last some have awakened to the
fact that our all-able and all-willing artist is
quite as well pleased, and as capable, to do the
bidding of a Solomon as he is that of the mean-
est itinerant picture maker in the country— quite
as willing to heighten artistically the beauty of a
Scott-Siddons as to exaggerate the ugliness of a
Caliban—to hide in shadows the disagreeable, and
to smooth down the projections and wrinkles, as
he had been to force them with relentless exag-
geration upon our attention.
There is, then, an awakening to the fact that
instead of placing our patron bolt upright in a
seat, with his elbow on a table, his arm forming
an angle of a square, his face to the front, show-
ing one corner of his mouth turned up and the
other down, giving the appearance of a round
white spot, with two holes for eyes,* and a di-
agonal or oblique slit across it for a mouth. It
would answer the aims of portraiture as well to
place him at his ease on a handsome chair, re-
clining slightly for greater comfort, the good side
of his face turned to view, a little light to fall in
*See Mr. Whipple's article on "Educate the People," io
the " Photographic World " for August, 1872.