Explore "The Stereoscope" by David Brewster on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Having explained the only true method of taking binocular portraits which will appear in correct relief when placed in the stereoscope, we shall proceed in this chapter to point out the application of the stereoscope to the art of painting in all its branches. In doing this we must not forget how much the stereoscope owes to photography, and how much the arts of design might reasonably expect from the solar pencil, when rightly guided, even if the stereoscope had never been invented.
When the processes of the Daguerreotype and Talbotype, the sister arts of Photography, were first given to the world, it was the expectation of some, and the dread of others, that the excellence and correctness of their delineations would cast into the shade the less truthful representations of the portrait and the landscape painter. An invention which supersedes animal power, or even the professional labour of man, might have been justly hailed as a social blessing, but an art which should supersede the efforts of genius, and interfere with the exercise of those creative powers which represent to us what is beautiful and sublime in nature, would, if such a thing were possible, be a social evil.