Europe

Long before color film, there were color photographs of Europe that look almost as fresh as a postcard printed yesterday. They are called photochroms, and they are one of the great surprises in the archive.

The process was invented in Switzerland in the 1880s. A printer took a black-and-white negative and transferred it, by hand, onto a series of lithographic stones, one for each color. The result looked like a color photograph, and it was sold to tourists across Europe in the 1890s and early 1900s. In the United States, the Detroit Publishing Company bought the rights and printed thousands of them. A large set later came to the Library of Congress.

These were made for travelers, so they show what travelers came to see. Paris has its boulevards, cathedrals and the Eiffel Tower, which was new and controversial when it went up for the 1889 World's Fair. Italy means Rome, Venice, Naples and Florence. Britain and Ireland have castles, cathedrals, harbors and green countryside. Moscow has the Kremlin and the bright domes of St. Basil's.

Spain is the biggest group on this board, and it rewards a slow look. The Alhambra in Granada, the cathedral and Alcázar in Seville, the old streets of Toledo and Córdoba all show the long mark of Moorish rule on Spanish building. Courtyards with fountains and carved arches turn up again and again.

Poland has its own story. For more than a century, from 1795 to 1918, there was no Polish state on the map at all. The land had been divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. Pictures of Kraków and Warsaw from those years show Polish cities living under foreign rule, which a caption often does not mention. Ireland in these pictures is also part of the United Kingdom, as it was until 1922. When you look at any of the color views, keep in mind that the colors were chosen by a printer, not captured by a lens. They are usually close to life, but now and then a sky is a bit too blue.