Library celebrates the season with painted lantern slide in Digital Collections

For this year’s holiday greeting, Yale Library has selected a winter scene in Tokyo—“Scenery of Shiba Park in Snow.” The image is one of hundreds in the Missionary Ephemera Collection in the Divinity Library. Our holiday image, ca. 1890s, is in the digitized series “Lantern slides 113-168.”

Lantern slides were made with an early photographic technique that involved pressing a light-sensitive glass plate onto a negative and then exposing the plate to light and chemicals. To create colored slides like this one, the black-and-white positive image on the glass was hand-painted on the emulsion side of the plate.

Lantern slides were viewed in an early type of projector known as a “magic lantern,” a single-lens device that predated the invention of the camera by several centuries. The slide was inserted in the lantern upside down to appear right side up when projected.

The Divinity Library’s Missionary Ephemera Collection contains various materials documenting missionary work from 1800 to the 1950s. Many of the lantern slides in the collection were created by and for missionaries. Magic-lantern shows helped missionary organizations fundraise and teach supporters about their efforts in “foreign” lands, such as China, India, Japan, and regions of Africa.

The photographer who made this image is not identified, but the collection contains several photographs by the Japanese artist and photographer Nakajima Matsuchi (1850–1938). This slide may have been painted by Nakajima’s wife, herself an artist who hand-colored lantern slides and photographs. From the late 19th century until the early 20th, when color photography emerged, studios in Japan and the United States specialized in hand-painting glass slides.

The thousands of lantern slides in the library’s collections—at the Divinity Library, Beinecke Library, and Medical Library–are available to view in Yale Library Digital Collections.

—Deborah Cannarella