Abstract
WE regret to see the announcement of the death, at the ripe age of eighty-three, of MR. JOHN THOMSON, a well-known pioneer in the application of photography to the furtherance of geographical knowledge at a time when the photographer depended for success on his own skill rather than on the improved appliances which have since put the art within the reach of every amateur traveller. Mr. Thomson started for the Far East in 1862, and, after residing for a time at Singapore, in 1865 undertook the first of his more ambitious journeys, which took him to the interior of Cambodia, where he secured excellent pictures of the wonderful antiquarian remains lying buried in the tropical jungles, particularly at Nakhon Wat. Under the title “The Antiquities of Cambodia” he published in 1867 a selection of these photographs in book form, with descriptive letterpress, thus making those imposing ruins first generally known to the British public. Later he extended his wanderings to China, both visiting many of the ports and making trips into the interior, one of which took him up the Yangtse beyond the gorges of its middle course. In 1873 he issued an extensive series of photographs, illustrative of China and its people, in four folio volumes. Two years later he published a general narrative of his “ten years' travels, adventures, arid residence” in the Far East. Once more, in 1878, he made use of his camera for the illustration of a country more or less off the beaten track—this time the island of Cyprus—on which he issued an illustrated work in two quarto volumes in 1879. When, about this time, a scheme of instruction for intending travellers was set on foot by the Royal Geographical Society, Mr. Thomson, who had become a fellow of the society in 1866, was put in charge of the instruction in photography, for their proficiency in which many travellers have been largely indebted to his valuable hints. At his studio in Bond Street he had the privilege of taking the portraits of many distinguished modern travellers, and he extended his collection to those of earlier times by photographic reproductions of existing portraits.
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Obituary. Nature 108, 221 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/108221a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/108221a0