John Stewart

John Stewart British, 1800-1887 John Stewart, son-in-law of the important early photographic innovator Sir John Herschel, worked primarily in France. In 1847 he moved to Pau, on the French side of the Pyrenees, and many of his views are of this area. Others who lived and worked together in the vicinity of Pau during this time include Jean-Jacques Heilmann, Joseph Vigier, Adolphe Godard, and Farnham Maxwell Lyte. Stewart also worked with Henri-Victor Regnault, with whom he visited England. Stewart was principally a calotypist of landscape views, and some of his early work was published by Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Évrard in Souvenirs des Pyrénées (1853). He became a member of the Société française de photographie in 1855 and in 1857 photographed Versailles. A frequent experimenter with photographic processes, Stewart explored enlarging and made useful changes to the paper negative process. With Herschel he is said to have discussed an early version of the microfiche process for information storage. T.W.F.