Featured on PDR in the collection Painted Photograph of an Unknown Man (ca. 1855–70)

In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced that he'd developed a way of making a lasting image using, not the artist's brush or pen, but the rays of the sun. And so the revolutionary art of photography was born. It would be some decades though before colour could be captured, and so, with demand for colourful images high, photographic studios soon began to hand-colour their monochrome prints. Only three years after Daguerre’s announcement, came the first American patent for hand-colouring daguerreotypes, with a second patent following soon after. There were two ways to steer a photograph from its monochrome existence into the world of colour: hand tinting, which involved subtley painting the image so that it was still identifiable as a photograph, and "over-painting", painting over a…