Getty Museum

Fac-simile of an Old Printed Page

Date

negative 1839 or later; print before June 1844

Medium

Salted paper print

Culture

British

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> This print was mounted as the ninth plate in an original copy of *The Pencil of Nature*, William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844-46 illustrated treatise on photography. The negative was “taken from a black-letter volume in the Author’s library, containing the statutes of Richard the Second, written in Norman French.” Talbot felt that “to the Antiquarian this application of the photographic art seems destined to be of great advantage.” He cheated a little, however, by selecting for reproduction a page with text on one side only. > > Talbot placed the leaf on a sensitive sheet of photographic paper in the sun. The resulting negative could then be used to make many identical copies of the original printing, an application commonplace to us today but an enormous time-saver over banks of scribes. This printed leaf was a favorite of Talbot’s. It initially saw service in the summer of 1839, the first public year of photography, and he produced numerous negatives from it. The large quantity of prints required for *The Pencil of Nature* was probably made close to the time of its publication, possibly from one or more negatives freshly created for the job at hand. > > Larry Schaaf, *William Henry Fox Talbot*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 86. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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