English Bund, Shanghai
1865
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
23.6 × 32.5 cm (9 5/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.583 (90a)
Art Historical Context
Step into 1865 Shanghai with John Thomson's *English Bund, Shanghai*, an albumen silver print that captures the vibrant heart of the city's foreign-dominated waterfront. Thomson, a Scottish photographer and pioneering chronicler of Asia, documented this bustling scene along the Huangpu River, where grand European-style buildings rose amid junks and merchants, symbolizing the era's explosive colonial trade. Made from a glass negative using the wet-collodion process, this 23.6 × 32.5 cm print exemplifies mid-19th-century photographic innovation. Albumen prints, coated with egg whites for a glos...
About the Artist
John Thomson · 1837–1921
John Thomson (1837–1921), a pioneering Scottish photographer, was born on 14 June 1837 in Edinburgh as the eighth of nine children to William Thomson, a tobacco spinner and trader, and Isabella Newlands.) After schooling in the early 1850s, he apprenticed with a local optical and scientific instrument manufacturer, where he mastered the principles of photography, completing his training around 185...