[Lacock Abbey], William Henry Fox Talbot, November 4, 1839
William Henry Fox Talbot, portraitWilliam Henry Fox TalbotAngleterre, 1800–1877

[Lacock Abbey]

1839 · Photograph · 5.6 × 6.8 cm

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> William Henry Fox Talbot began his experiments with light-sensitive materials in mid-1834 and in 1835 achieved results that have survived to the present day. His first pictures created with light are the shadows of plants ([85.XM.150.13](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/53337)) or of textiles ([85.XM.150.14](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/59845)) placed directly on top of a piece of ordinary paper that was brushed with a solution of table salt and then a solution of silver nitrate. When the silver nitrate came in contact with the salt it became light sensitive silver chloride. Eventually Talbot made pictures by exposing sensitized paper to sunlight through a lens fitted to a wooden box known as a camera obscura (such as this image of Lacock Abbey, Talbot's country home in Lacock, Wiltshire County, England).

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He called these images "photogenic drawings," thus associating them with the history of art rather than natural history. Until the spring of 1839, most of Talbot's pictures were negatives, that is, the tones of nature are reversed, with the light areas reading as dark and vice versa. Adapted from Weston Naef, *The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection* (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 8-9. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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Numéro d’inventaire
85.XM.150.22

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Pendant ce temps, chez William Henry Fox Talbot

La vie entière
  1. 1837 · Distinction

    Royal Society Bakerian Medal

  2. 16 mars 1837

    Daughter born: Rosamond Constance Talbot

  3. 25 January 1839

    First showing of photographs at the Royal Institution

    Shortly after Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype was announced in early January, Talbot asserted his priority and, at a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution, exhibited several paper photographs he had made in 1835. Within a fortnight he described the nature of his process to the Royal Society, while Daguerre revealed no useful details of his own until mid-August.

  4. 1840

    Invents the calotype

    Talbot found a way to print any number of positives on salted paper from a paper negative; new chemicals cut the exposure to a minute in bright sunlight. He called the method the “calotype” (from kalos, beautiful), informally the “talbotype”: unlike the daguerreotype with its single positive, it effectively created modern photography.

  5. 1840–1841

    Post: High Sheriff of Wiltshire

  6. February 1841

    Patents the calotype

    Talbot obtained an English patent for the calotype process and sold licences at £20 each, later lowering the fee for amateurs to £4 while professionals paid up to £300 a year; scientists saw it as a hindrance to scientific freedom. He justified his rigour by the roughly £5,000 he had spent on photography; for science the method was free, and Talbot himself published the first known photomicrograph of a mineral crystal.

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