Originally from Wales, Charles Clifford and his wife Jane settled in Madrid around 1850, where they founded the studio El Daguerrotipo Inglés (The English Daguerreotype ). It is regrettable that almost all sources ignore Jane's work, despite the fact that both were already distinguished photographers: Charles Clifford was appointed "Photographer to Her Majesty the Queen," and Jane Clifford was the first woman admitted to the Société française de photographie (French Photographic Society). They partnered with the impresario Arthur Goulston to take photographs from a hot air balloon flying over the bullring, a popular spectacle advertised on posters, one of which is preserved in the National Library of Spain in Madrid. After her husband's death in 1863, Jane continued working as a photographer until her own death on an unknown date (1885?).
As “Photographer to Her Majesty” Isabella II, Charles Clifford documented the royal couple's trip to Valladolid in 1858. “The problems a photographer encounters in his work are not few when traveling through a country like Spain, where the comforts of transport are unknown; where temperatures reach up to 40 degrees in the shade; where water is as difficult to find as in the Sahara Desert itself […] the equipment must necessarily be large, and can weigh up to 300 kilos… With this baggage properly balanced and secured to the backs of mules […] we begin our daily expeditions at four in the morning.” ( A photographic scramble through Spain ).
The album , "Memories of Their Majesties' and Their Royal Highnesses' Journey to Valladolid and the Solemn Inauguration of the Prince Alfonso Bridge ," consists of five pages of text and ten albumen prints mounted on paper. Although Clifford began his career as a photographer using the daguerreotype and later the calotype, by 1856 he was already using wet collodion negatives and albumen prints, a variant of the salt print invented by Talbot. In this process, the paper is treated with egg white, salts, and silver nitrate, giving the image a characteristic satin-like appearance with sepia tones shifting to purple. The print was obtained on a contact print press by direct exposure to sunlight, requiring no development but simply fixing. Albumen prints are always mounted on a secondary support, as the paper is thin and curls due to the shrinkage of the albumen.
In the copy that came into our possession, although the text pages showed damp stains with slight microbial growth, the photographs, surprisingly well preserved in their intensity and the quality of their light contrasts and nuances, had not been affected by humidity, with the exception of the secondary support of photograph no. 10, which did show slight microbial contamination at the margin. The protective sheets for the prints were wrinkled and also showed damp stains, and it is astonishing how this humidity did not affect the photographs; the explanation may lie in the greater hygroscopicity of papers not treated with chemical processes—the albumen preparation and perhaps a final waxing or collodion varnish. Small additions of details in ink are visible in some images. The cleaning and microorganism neutralization procedure took into account the extreme delicacy of the photographic work, protecting it at all times from direct light, opting for localized treatments, and replacing the protective sheets with barrier paper for photographic prints.
