William Henry Fox Talbot – Dandelion Seeds, c. 1858 | Giclée Print

Dandelion clocks, seed head after seed head, each one a little wheel of spokes with a dark seed at the end of every spoke. The whole sheet is these wheels, overlapping, drifting off the edges. It is a photograph, and it is also an etching — which in 1858 was a new thing in the world.

Photoglyphic engraving. Twenty years after he invented photography on paper, Talbot went after the problem that would outlive him: how to print a photograph in ink, on a press, so that it would not fade. He coated a steel or copper plate with light-sensitive gelatine, laid the object on it, exposed it to the sun, etched the plate and printed it like an engraving. He patented the process in 1858 and called it photoglyphic engraving. It is the direct ancestor of photogravure, and of every photograph printed in a book since.

What you are looking at is therefore a photogram that has been turned into a copper plate and inked — the plant's own shadow, drawn by the sun and then bitten into metal. The plate mark is visible around the picture, as it is on the original sheet.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a photoglyphic engraving, made with pigment inks. It is not an impression from Talbot's plate and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: sheet 15.1 × 11.3 cm, plate 12.5 × 9.4 cm, image 10.5 × 7.6 cm — The Metropolitan Museum of Art
20 × 25 cm / 7.9 × 9.8 in — Original size, 1:1. Image 10.43 × 13.43 cm.
30 × 40 cm / 11.8 × 15.7 in — Enlarged 1.9×. Image 19.81 × 25.52 cm.

How we cut it. Talbot's sheet carries wide blank margins, the way a plate is printed on paper larger than itself. We do not reproduce all of that empty paper. We print the plate mark and about five millimetres of paper beyond it — the cut a framer makes when the mat window is set just outside the plate mark. Everything Talbot put on the sheet is inside that rectangle, plate mark included; what falls away is bare margin.

A correction, made the day this print went up. The first files were built on a scale anchor taken from a rough measurement of the sheet rather than the measured one, and printed about three quarters of a per cent small. We measured the sheet on the museum's file properly — 2725 by 3628 pixels against the catalogued 11.3 by 15.1 cm, the two readings agreeing to three parts in a thousand — and rebuilt both files the same day. The figures above are the corrected ones.

Why only two sizes. The museum's file gives 611 dpi across the picture at original size, far above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor. That reserve buys one honest enlargement: at 1.9× the print still carries 322 dpi. Past about 2× it would fall through, so we stop.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), [Dandelion Seeds], 1858 or later; photogravure — photoglyphic engraving from a copper plate.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Acc. No. 2004.111, Rogers Fund, 2004.
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 — the foxing and the warmth of the 1858 sheet are printed as they are. Unframed. Shipped flat or rolled, depending on size.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling.
Botanical prints — plants that printed themselves.