[The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey]
probably 1835
![[The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey] by William Henry Fox Talbot](https://images.artheonmuseum.org/met/ph/thumb/the-oriel-window-south-gallery-lacock-abbey-282004.webp)
Medium
Paper negative
Dimensions
Sheet: 8.5 × 11.6 cm (3 3/8 × 4 9/16 in.), irregularly trimmed
Classification
Negatives
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee and Anonymous Gifts, 1997
Accession Number
1997.382.1
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the dawn of photography with *The Oriel Window, South Gallery Lacock Abbey*, a pioneering paper negative created by William Henry Fox Talbot 1835. Captured at Talbot's ancestral home in Wiltshire, England, this intimate image (measuring just 8.5 × 11.6 cm) frames the delicate tracery of an oriel window, bathed in soft light and shadow. As one of the earliest surviving photographs, it showcases Talbot's groundbreaking experiments in fixing images from nature, sparked by a desire to surpass the fleeting sketches of his sketching tours. Talbot, a British scientist and inventor, develop...
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...