Talbot Photo 2(5)

One of three copies of this subject in the collection (Talbot Photo 2(5-7)). View looking down on a Parisian street scene. Chemistry float-applied on paper 187 x 224 mm.

Also published as plate 2 of 'The Pencil of Nature', which was published on the 24th June 1844, with accompanying text reading, 'This view was taken from one of the upper windows of the Hotel de Douvres, situated at the corner of the Rue de la Paix. The spectator is looking to the North-east. The time is the afternoon. The sun is just quitting the range of buildings adorned with columns: its façade is already in the shade, but a single shutter standing open projects far enough forward to catch a gleam of sunshine. The weather is hot and dusty, and they have just been watering the road, which has produced two broad bands of shade upon it, which unite in the foreground, because, the road being partially under repair (as is seen from the two wheelbarrows, &c. &c.), the watering machines have been compelled to cross to the other side. By the roadside a row of cittadines and cabriolets are waiting, and a single carriage stands in the distance a long way to the right. A whole forest of chimneys borders the horizon: for, the instrument chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere. The view is taken from a considerable height, as appears easily by observing the house on the house on the right hand, the eye being necessarily on a level with that part of the building on which the horizontal lines or courses of stone appear parallel to the margin of the picture.'

For a discussion of this image, see Larry J. Schaaf, 'The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot' (Princeton University Press, Princeton and London, 2000), p. 160.

[Schaaf 128.]