Getty Museum

[Tree]

Date

1853

Medium

Salted paper print

Culture

French

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> Using William Henry Fox Talbot's calotype process (a photographic process where a negative is created first), one could make multiple prints from a single negative. This soon allowed for the potential of editions of photographs. Reverend Calvert Richard Jones ([89.XM.75.1-.2](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/59142), [84.XP.726.71](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/43540), [84.XM.1002.17](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/46959), and [85.XM.150.18](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/53387)) exposed more than three hundred paper negatives that he hoped could be used for this purpose; however Talbot's calotypes were unstable, and it was in France that the potential for uniform editions of photographs was first realized. Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard created an establishment at Lille, France, similar to Talbot's workshop in Reading England, where the all-too-fugitive prints bound into *The Pencil of Nature* had been made ([84.XZ.571](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/search/?view=grid&query=YTozOntzOjg6Il9udW1iZXJzIjtzOjk6Ijg0LlhaLjU3MSI7czo0MToiKGlkZW50aWZpZXIucHJpbWFyeXxpZGVudGlmaWVyLmFsdGVybmF0ZSkiO3M6OToiODQuWFouNTcxIjtzOjQ6InNvcnQiO3M6MTE6InNvcnQubnVtYmVyIjt9)). The French improvements to Talbot's calotype must surely have been motivated by Blanquart-Evrard's desire to facilitate the presentation of his own photographs. His work consisted of family portraits in the manner of Hill and Adamson and landscapes such as this study of a tree which is closely related in motif to works by Barbizon School artist Charles Marville ([84.XM.505.20](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/62090)) Adapted from Weston Naef, *The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection* (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 28. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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