Graham Nash Adds to Getty Museum Riches : Art: The pop musician has donated his collection of Sir John F. W. Herschel’s 19th-Century camera lucida drawings, made with the aid of an optical device that prefigured photography.

The photography collection of the world’s richest museum just became significantly richer. Pop musician Graham Nash and his wife, Susan, have given the J. Paul Getty Museum 280 camera lucida drawings by Sir John F. W. Herschel.

The 19th-Century drawings of European landscapes and buildings, executed with the help of an optical device, are direct precursors to photography. The Nash gift constitutes the bulk of the only known drawings by Herschel (1792-1871), a celebrated British astronomer and mathematician who was one of photography’s early innovators.

“It’s a great collection. I thought it should be in a great place,” said Nash, who bought a volume of 316 Herschel drawings in 1974. Nash has kept 36, which may find eventually find their way into other collections. But--unless a large body of lost drawings comes to light--the Getty will remain the repository for Herschel’s pioneering work. Herschel actually did more than 700 camera lucida drawings, but more than half of them have disappeared, said Weston Naef, director of the Getty’s department of photographs.

Nash said he decided to give the collection to the Getty because Naef shares his enthusiasm for the work and understands its importance in history.

Nash, a founder of the pop music group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, began collecting photography in the early ‘70s. He built a massive collection that won critical acclaim when it was displayed in a traveling exhibition, seen locally in 1981 at UCLA. He has dispersed most of the collection in the past two years, giving 140 contemporary photographs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and selling 450 pieces in a New York auction that brought a total of 2.38 million.

The wealthy institution may seem an unlikely recipient of the Nash gift, but museum director John Walsh contends that the Getty is the best possible place for the drawings. “We have what is quite simply the best collection in the world representing English, French and American photography from the 1840s, ‘50s and ‘60s,” Walsh said. The drawings, done between 1816 and 1865 with an exacting prismatic device that led to the development of modern photography, complement the strength of the Getty’s collection.

The donation also suits the museum because the Getty’s photography holding is “a collection of collections assembled by true believers,” Walsh said. “The decisions were not made by trustees or curators or by me. They were made by passionate, somewhat off-center human beings who were helplessly in love with what they were collecting.”

The Getty put itself on the photography map in 1984 by purchasing 18,000 photographs, including the revered collections of Americans Samuel Wagstaff and Arnold Crane as well as several collections assembled in Germany and Switzerland.

Nash discovered the Herschel drawings at Magg’s bookstore in London. “The family has had the shop in Berkeley Square since Dickens,” he said. One day while he was on a rock ‘n’ roll tour, he wandered into the shop and struck up a conversation with John Magg, who was better known for selling manuscripts than photographs. Magg took a fancy to the young rock star and invited him down to the basement for a cup of tea, “maybe because I was asking the right questions,” Nash said.

Nash knew that Herschel had invented the cyanotype (blue print) process and a fixative that prevents photographic images from fading. He even knew that Herschel had coined the term photography, but he was not aware of his camera lucida drawings. When Magg showed him the volume of drawings, “I knew but for the lack of a bunch of chemicals, these were the first photographs,” Nash said.

Herschel’s early 19th-Century works come from a period when artists put new emphasis on direct observation of nature rather than working from formulas, Naef said. Herschel made many of the drawings on grand tours of Europe, recording natural wonders and man-made monuments.

Working in graphite on paper, he used a camera lucida to achieve a more exact representation than his unaided eye could produce. He would clip the base of the camera lucida’s vertical rod to his drawing board and point a prism--mounted on the top end of the rod--at his subject. Looking through the prism onto the board, he would draw the image that was reflected by the prism.

Drawings in the Nash gift vary from delicately outlined shapes to fully shaded forms. The work changes over time, from tightly detailed copies of nature to looser interpretations as the invention of the camera replaced art’s documentary function, Naef noted.

When the Getty Center opens its new museum in Brentwood, Naef plans to show the Herschel drawings as part of a continuum including early photographs and contemporary views of the same subjects.