Minneapolis Institute of Art

The Ancient Vestry, Calvert Jones in the Cloisters of Lacock Abbey

William Henry Fox Talbot

Date

1845

Medium

Calotype

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

One of the pioneers of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot created this image of his friend the Reverend Calvert R. Jones Jr. seated in the sacristy of Lacock Abbey, a favorite subject of his. Talbot often photographed the thirteenth-century building’s latticed windows, stately rooms, and fortresslike exterior. The process he developed, called calotype, employed a camera to create a paper negative, which was then contact printed to render a positive image. The paper fibers in the negative produced soft images that were well suited to depicting the brooding Gothic structure. Between 1844 and 1846, Talbot published his photographs in six installments, paired with text identifying their subjects and explaining how the images were made. Bound together, they became the first photographically illustrated book—The Pencil of Nature. England, Europe

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