Matte albumen print

Matte albumen is the answer the trade gave to the complaint the trade had created. The glossiness of albumen photographs was highly criticised in the photographic literature of the 1850s, because the public was accustomed to the matte character of salt prints — and this is the paper made for the people who kept complaining. Read the albumen print first: everything below is a variation on it.

The chemistry

One deliberate reversal of the glossy paper’s preparation. Reilly’s account of albumen turns on three denaturing treatments — beating, chloride and a lowering of pH — and it is the third that makes a glossy sheet. Native egg white is alkaline at pH 7.8; glossy papers are made with partially decomposed, acidic albumen, which coats more evenly, gives a glossier surface and has less tendency to yellow after sensitisation.

Reilly then names the exception in one clause: fresh alkaline albumen is used only for matte papers, and then always mixed with starch or another substance.

That is the whole recipe difference the course can source, and it is worth reading twice, because it says two separate things. The albumen is not aged and acidified, so the layer does not level into a gloss. And it is not albumen alone — a second, non-protein substance is present, which is the same device the arrowroot papers use, arriving from the other direction.

!What this atlas cannot state about it

No source read for this course gives a matte albumen formulation with quantities — which starch, in what proportion, with what chloride, coated to what weight. The glossy paper’s figures are published in detail and this variant’s are not, at least not in the corpus behind this course.

The register plans this as a row of its own, and it is written as one because the register plans it; what it can carry honestly is the mechanism, the surface, the toning preference and the shared permanence problem. A reader who needs to make one should treat the formulation as an open question rather than assume this page has withheld it.

Historical workflow

The same sequence as the glossy paper — coat, harden, sensitise, print out, rinse, tone, fix, wash — with a different albumen going onto the sheet at the start and a different toner preferred at the other end.

The toning preference is the best-documented thing about the variant. Reilly records that the effects obtainable with platinum toning harmonise especially well with a matte surface, and that platinum toning was preferred for the many kinds of arrowroot and matte albumen paper as well as for the matte collodion and matte gelatin printing-out papers popular between 1895 and 1925. Matte collodion was toned in gold and then platinum for a neutral or olive black; matte gelatin printing-out paper was toned in platinum alone, which is why so much of it is brown.

And the negative case is as informative as the positive one. Reilly is emphatic that all platinic chloride formulae — the platinum(IV) salts of De Caranza’s 1856 suggestion — have so little toning energy that at best they are restricted to matte papers and are totally ineffective with albumen paper. It is the platinous salt, potassium chloroplatinite, that is a very active toner in acid. The platinum toner is in the formulary as chemistry only, at Level C, and the course does not ask anyone to use it.

The image

Matte, which is the entire point, and a surface that reads much more like a salted paper print than like a glossy albumen one — while the image still sits in a binder on the surface rather than among the fibres, so it keeps some of the sharpness and highlight cleanliness the binder buys.

Colour follows the toner. Where platinum toned, brown and brownish-black rather than the purple a gold bath gives; and Reilly’s warning about over-toning applies, that it yellows the highlights.

A caution about identification. A matte, brown, nineteenth-century print on thin paper could be matte albumen, arrowroot, matte collodion or matte gelatin printing-out paper, and Reilly’s own grouping of them under one toning preference is a sign of how alike they were meant to look. This atlas does not offer an identification key it has not read.

Permanence

The albumen print’s own failure, unchanged, because the binder is unchanged in kind. Albumen binds silver so tightly that hypo does not remove it, so a small amount of silver remains in every area of a fixed sheet, highlights included; labile sulfur converts it to silver sulfide; and the resulting yellow stain is more chemically stable than the image itself, so no known treatment removes it without destroying the print.

Whether a matte albumen sheet retains more or less silver than a glossy one — a real question, since the layer is differently prepared and carries a second substance — is not answered by any source read here.

The counter-measure is the one the Fading Committee reached in 1855 and the trade kept: thorough washing, and toning with a noble metal. On this surface that meant platinum more often than gold.

Hazards

The albumen print’s hazards, plus one that raises the ceiling rather than the baseline.

Silver nitrate at sensitising strength, Level B. Isopropanol at 70 per cent if the sheet is hardened chemically rather than cured. Ammonium chloride, mild.

Platinum toning is the difference. Potassium tetrachloroplatinate is a respiratory sensitiser whose EH40 limit is 0.002 mg/m³ as platinum with the Sen notation, and its encyclopaedia entry classifies the substance Level C. The course’s ruling that students perform palladium and never handle platinum is a ruling about printing sensitisers; a toning bath is a different operation, and the platinum toner is published at Level C and not offered for use. A reader wanting the period look on a matte surface should read that page before anything else.

Where the course teaches it

Part XXII, not Part XXIII — and the correction is worth stating plainly, because this entry previously recorded the row as owed by the albumen part and it is not.

The Variants of the Salt Print and How a Conservator Identifies One is where it is taught, and it is taught structurally rather than as a curiosity. The lesson sets the whole family on a binder ladder running from plain salted paper to pure albumen, and matte albumen sits near the bottom of it as albumen mixed with starch — Hübl’s invention, equal volumes of albumen and a 2 per cent arrowroot solution, brownish red untoned, purplish black with gold alone and warm brown to black with combined gold and platinum. Four properties rise as you go down that ladder and one falls, and the one that falls is the tonal scale, which is why a matte paper wants a longer-scale negative than a glossy one.

That placement resolves the question this entry used to leave open. Matte albumen is not a footnote to the albumen print; it is a matte salted paper made with a mixture of albumen and starch, which is why it belongs to the salted-paper part’s variants lesson and why it sits on the ladder between arrowroot paper and glossy albumen rather than beside either.

Part XXIII names it twice and hands it back. Egg Albumen: A Protein Binder and What It Does to Silver places it at the far end of the gloss argument the whole part traces, and The Albumen Print as an Object, and How It Decays carries it in its table of the ways the trade moved the surface, with the sentence this entry is organised around: matte albumen is not a variant of the glossy print; it is a different tonal instrument built from the same chemistry. That lesson is also where the two dates disagree — the Getty’s timeline puts the introduction at 1897 against Reilly’s February 1895 first printing — and this entry’s dateNote records both.

A reader should still take the two neighbouring rows together. The albumen print is the process this one varies, and arrowroot and albumenised salted paper is the other route to the same surface — a starch binder with citric acid, where this is a protein binder kept alkaline and mixed with starch. The two rows meet in the middle, and the fact that the trade sold both is evidence about what buyers wanted rather than about what chemistry required.