Oct 15, 2007 - Sale 2124

Sale 2124 - Lot 2

Price Realized: $ 16,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
TALBOT, WILLIAM HENRY FOX (1800-1877)
"Hungerford Bridge." Salted paper print from a calotype negative, 6 1/2x8 1/4 inches (16.5x21 cm.), with a watermark indicating the paper manufacturer's name and date. 1842
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Additional Details

Ledel Gallery, New York; by agent to C. W. Sahlman.


The Tampa Museum of Art, "At Anchor and Underway: Images from a Tampa Collection," 1992.


Fox Talbot: Photographer, unpaginated.


The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, 217.


William Henry Fox Talbot was one of the most distinguished figures of the 19th century. Along with inventing the negative-positive photographic process, the polarizing microscope and a design for a linear motor, he developed a method for measuring the distance between fixed stars, was one of few scholars able to translate Assyrian cuneiform, was a notable botanist, and photo-engraver.

Talbot's interest in photography was forged in 1833 when, at Lake Como, he was making sketches with his camera lucida. His earliest photogenic drawings (i.e., photograms) were of leaves and lace pressed against this special paper and exposed to sunlight. He next worked on using his invention to record the objects he saw through the camera obscura. Since his earliest drawings were reversed, he devised a solution to this fault. His friend, Sir John Herschel, characterized the process as relying on negative (the original reversed image) and positive (the photographic print or copy).

However, it was not until 1839 that Talbot announced his discovery to the public and submitted a group of photographs to the Royal Institution. Unfortunately, his discovery appeared at the same time as that of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. To prove that he was the actual inventor of photography he sent samples of his work to London. A week later he explained his process to the Royal Society in a paper entitled "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing." Once his formula became public knowledge, it did not take long for pre-sensitized paper to be produced and made available to everyone. In 1840 Talbot revised his process to increase the paper's sensitivity and reduce the necessary exposure time down to half-a-minute. He also found that sensitized paper lasted longer and did not need to be inserted into the camera immediately after production.

By creating a solution that allowed him to develop an image once it was removed from the camera, Talbot discovered the '"latent image." A year later he patented this discovery, wanting at first to name it Calotype, meaning beautiful in Greek, but was persuaded by friends to term the process the Talbotype. As lenses improved, so did the quality of his later prints and his work soon rivaled Daguerre. Talbot created the first photographically illustrated book, "The Pencil of Nature."

Talbot recognized photography as a fine art form. "We have sufficient authority in the Dutch School of Art for taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence. A painter's eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable. A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across his path, a time-withered oak, or a moss-covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings, and picturesque imaginings."

True of this image, we see Isambard Kingdom Brunel's suspension pedestrian footbridge, the Hungerford Bridge, which opened in 1845. It spannedthe River Thames from The Embankment to Lambeth and linked London's West End with the South Bank. The photographer's composition sets the masts of the boats against an engineering marvel, the bridge.