A Corn Roast

Children, Landscape, Figure, Landscape, Streams, Smoke

Dimensions

Image Dimensions: 14.7 x 23.2 cm June, 1892: whole #46
Support Dimensions: 34.6 x 27.4 cm

Associated Blog Posts:

Summer Streams Wide & Small

Oliver Patterson Watts,  American: (1865-1953)

The index for Sun & Shade in which this photograph appears states:

Mr. Watts writes us that while wandering with his camera along “The Green,” a favorite picnic ground near Thomastown,(sic) Maine, he came upon this group of boys roasting corn and potatoes. At the sight of the camera they immediately grouped themselves, anxious to be “took.” The negative was made with a Scovill Favorite Camera, Waterbury lens, with an exposure of five seconds on a seed plate. It was developed with Pyro and Sodium Carbonate.

Dr. Oliver Patterson Watts was born in Thomaston, Maine, and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1889. Interestingly, in 1890, Potts and Dr. Julius Stieglitz, the brother of the future famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, were fellow scholars in chemistry at the newly opened Clark University in Worcester, MA. Potts later entered the University of Wisconsin in 1905 and took charge of the Carnegie Research on Electrolytic Iron under Dr. Charles F. Burgess. According to an Oct. 2009 article on Potts for the online resource Plating & Surface Finishing, the most important of his fifty-nine papers on plating and corrosion is probably “Rapid Nickel Plating,” presented before the Electrochemical Society in 1915.