William Henry Fox Talbot – A Scene in a Library, 1844 | Giclée Print

Two shelves of books, photographed in daylight in 1844, when a photograph of anything at all was a rarity. The spines are legible enough to read the gilding on them. Talbot put the plate in The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs, and wrote beside it a note about invisible rays and the idea that a camera might one day record what the eye cannot see.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a salted paper print, made with pigment inks. Not an original photograph; Talbot's are in museums.

A rich impression, and that is the point. Salt prints fade, and most surviving copies of this plate are pale and flat. The Metropolitan Museum's copy is not: it is deep brown, almost black in the ground, with the books standing out of it. We looked at another institution's copy first and turned it down for exactly that reason. This is the same picture in far better condition.

Scale
Original: image 13.3 × 18 cm / 5.2 × 7.1 in on a sheet of about 19 × 24 cm — The Metropolitan Museum of Art
40 × 30 cm / 15.7 × 11.8 in — Original size, 1:1. Sheet reproduced 23.75 × 19.37 cm.

We print the whole sheet, not just the picture. Talbot sensitised a piece of writing paper larger than his negative, so the paper around the picture went dark in the light as well. That dark field, with its uneven edges where he trimmed the sheet by hand, is part of the object; the white you see in the notches at the edges is the museum's mount showing through. Cropping to the bookcase alone would make a tidier rectangle and a less honest one.

One size only. Measured against the picture as catalogued, the file gives 346 dpi at original size — above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. It does not give more. An enlargement would top out near 1.15×, which is not an enlargement, so we do not offer one.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), A Scene in a Library, before 22 March 1844; salted paper print from a paper negative, image 13.3 × 18 cm. Plate VIII of The Pencil of Nature.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Acc. No. 2005.100.172, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation as open access.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling.