Lacock Abbey
Medium
Salted paper print from paper negative
Dimensions
Image: 17.8 x 18.6 cm (7 x 7 5/16 in.) Sheet: 18.7 x 21.5 cm (7 3/8 x 8 7/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936
Accession Number
36.37 (33)
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the dawn of photography with *Lacock Abbey* (1840), a salted paper print by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the medium's true pioneers. Captured at his ancestral home in Wiltshire, England, this intimate view of the historic abbey showcases Talbot's groundbreaking calotype process—a paper negative that allowed for multiple positive prints, unlike the one-of-a-kind daguerreotypes of rival Louis Daguerre. At just 17.8 x 18.6 cm, modest scale belies its monumental importance. Talbot's technique involved sensitizing paper with silver salts, exposing it in-camera, and developing a subtl...
About the Artist
William Henry Fox Talbot · 1800–1877
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), a British polymath whose ingenuity transformed visual representation, was born on 11 February 1800 at Melbury House, Dorset, the only child of William Davenport Talbot of Lacock Abbey and Lady Elisabeth Fox Strangways, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester. His father died shortly after his birth, leaving the family in financial straits until his formidable mo...