Thomas Sutton

Thomas Sutton, who was born in Kensington, London, studied architecture before earring a Bachelor of Arts degree from Caius College in Cambridge. Photography first entered his life in 1841 when he posed for a daguerreotype portrait in Antoine Claudet's studio. In 1855 he set up a photographic company in Jersey with business partner Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard that produced prints from calotype (paper coated with silver) negatives. Sutton's photographs preserved the colour information in black-and-white silver images containing no actual colouring matter, so they were very light-fast and durable and the set may reasonably be described as the first colour photographs.

He published The Calotype Process: A Hand Book to Photography on Paper and A New Method of Printing Positive Photographs By Which Permanent and Artistic Results May Be Uniformly Obtained. In later years he focused on colour photography and experimented with dry plate development.