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William Henry Fox Talbot invented negative-positive photography in 1839 with a patent he later called the calotype. Published serially in London between 1844 and 1846, his book The Pencil of Nature was the first publication to explain and illustrate the scientific and practical applications of photography. The 24 plates from Talbot’s oeuvre were selected to convey the range of uses to which photography could be put. “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil,” he wrote in the introduction. “They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.”
Among the most celebrated images from The Pencil of Nature, The Open Door is a genre scene in the tradition of seventeenth- century Dutch art. Here, Talbot employs the device known in Dutch art as the doorkijkje, or the vista opening from one room to another. In this case, the courtyard opens up into the barn and back again into the yard through the far window. Like the Dutch masters, Talbot lends psychological significance to the representation of an everyday scene through his sense of perspective and light and dark contrasts. (AS, "Image and After-Image," 5/22/2012)
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1985.14.1 |
