William Henry Fox Talbot – Articles of China, 1843–44 | Giclée Print

Four shelves of porcelain, set out the way a clerk would set them out. Cups with their saucers, a lidded pot, two little figures, an openwork basket in the middle of the third shelf because that is where it fitted. Nothing is arranged to charm. Then the sun was allowed to do the recording, and it recorded everything — the gilding on the rims, the painted sprigs, the shadow each piece throws on the shelf behind it.

Why he made it. This is Plate III of The Pencil of Nature, the first book ever illustrated with photographs, and the text Talbot printed beside it is not about beauty. He suggests that a collector photograph his china; and that should a thief ever take it, «the mute testimony of the picture» could be produced in court. It is the first argument anyone made for photography as evidence rather than as a picture — written by the man who had just invented the negative.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a salted paper print, made with pigment inks. It is not a salt print and is not sold as one — a salt print is a contact print made in sunlight from a paper negative, and Talbot's are in museums.

Scale
Original: image 13.7 × 18.2 cm / 5.4 × 7.2 in — The Art Institute of Chicago
35 × 27 cm / 13.8 × 10.6 in — Original size, 1:1. Image 18.20 × 14.98 cm.
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Enlarged, 2.1× original. Image 38.22 × 31.46 cm.

At original size the picture is the size Talbot printed it, in 1843. Enlarged, the porcelain comes up to the size it really was, and the grain of the salted paper becomes visible — a different picture, and a deliberate one. 2.1× is the ceiling we apply to photographs; this sheet is the only Talbot in the catalogue whose digitisation carries it. The Chicago file gives 1154 dpi at original size and 550 dpi enlarged, both far above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor. Nothing is upscaled.

One honest note on the measurement. The museum catalogues the image as 13.7 × 18.2 cm, a ratio of 1.33. The digitisation runs to 1.22 — it carries a little more height than the catalogued rectangle. We anchor the scale on the catalogued width of 18.2 cm and reproduce what the file holds, whole: 18.20 × 14.98 cm at 1:1.

Where this sheet ends. The museum's photograph is cropped to the picture. The paper the print sits on measures 18.7 × 22.4 cm, so there is a margin of bare sheet around it that is not in the file and therefore not in your print. What you get is the photograph itself, whole — the cabinet with its rounded corners and the dark ground on every side of it, including the cloudy mottling at the upper left where the coating went on unevenly. That is the object, not a fault, and it is printed as it is.

It stands a little off level. The shelves run about a degree downhill to the right. We cannot tell you whether the cabinet stood that way in front of Talbot's camera or whether the print lay slightly askew when the museum photographed it — the file is cropped to the picture, so there is no sheet edge left to settle it against. Straightening it would mean rotating the photograph and then cutting into it on all four sides to square the corners again: several millimetres of Talbot's picture removed to correct something that may never have been an error. We leave it as the museum recorded it.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), Articles of China, 1843–44; salted paper print from a paper negative, image 13.7 × 18.2 cm, sheet 18.7 × 22.4 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Acc. No. 2015.74.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation as open access under CC0.

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.