Llewelyn, John Dillwyn, 1810-1882

Polymath and nature photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn (1810-1882) was born at Swansea, Wales, where his maternal grandfather owned a number of estates. The family moved to Penllergare in 1817; upon coming of age, Llewelyn inherited his grandfather's property. Educated by private tutors, he matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford in 1827, and there he met many of the leading scientists of the day. This wide acquaintanceship with scholars, including emerging photographers, informed his early intellectual and aesthetic development.

Llewelyn was deeply interested in natural history. His estate at Penllergare was a supreme example of Victorian landscaping, with artificial lakes, a manmade waterfall, and many exotic plants. In the late 1830s, he began experimenting with calotypes and daguerreotypes as a method of documenting botanical specimens. His earliest daguerreotype is dated 1840, and in 1842 he used this process to send images of rare orchids to London's Kew Gardens for identification.

Llewelyn was a founding member of the Photographic Society of London in 1853 and exhibited at the Society's exhibitions from 1854 to 1858. Queen Victoria was a patron of his work and collected a number of his images for her albums. At the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Llewelyn exhibited four images under the title of Motion. These included a collodion, Clouds over St Catherines, Tenby, in which the clouds pictured are on the same negative as the main scene--probably the first ever such photograph, which won Llewelyn a silver medal. An example of his technical ingenuity was his first instantaneous image, Waves Breaking in Caswell Bay from 1853, achieved with a falling shutter that he himself invented.

In 1854 Llewelyn became very ill, most likely due to inhaling toxic chemicals, which exacerbated his life-long asthma. However, he continued experiments with glycerine and dry collodion plates, and in 1856 announced his oxymel process, preserving the collodion in a moist state for days to weeks. This was considered a great boon for photographers. He finally abandoned making images toward the end of the 1850s but remained active in public life, acting as a local magistrate around Swansea and endowing schools, churches, and parks until moving to London in the late 1870s, where he died.