Getty Museum

[The Milliner's Window]

Date

before January 1844

Medium

Salted paper print from a paper negative

Culture

British

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> In his 1844-46 treatise on photography, *The Pencil of Nature,* William Henry Fox Talbot observed that “the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso” might be photographed, “the more strange and fantastic the forms . . . , the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions. . . . However numerous the objects—however complicated the arrangement—the Camera depicts them all at once.” > > Outside Lacock Abbey, temporary shelves, draped in black velvet, supported arrangements of objects relocated from indoors, not unlike a traditional museum exhibit. Lady Elisabeth, Talbot’s mother, obviously delighted in this idea. She supplied the fanciful title for *The Milliner’s Window* and most likely the caps and bonnets as well. Did this re-create a scene from her dressing room, reconstructed outdoors in order to have sufficient light? Two variations on this theme were published in [*The Pencil of Nature: Articles of China*](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/129878/william-henry-fox-talbot-articles-of-china-british-1844/) and [*Articles of Glass on Three Shelves*](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/46954/william-henry-fox-talbot-articles-of-glass-on-three-shelves-british-before-june-1844/). > > Larry Schaaf, *William Henry Fox Talbot*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 78. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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