The 35 x 27 cm sheet lying flat, The Open Door printed at original size with white margins

William Henry Fox Talbot – The Open Door, 1844 | Giclée Print

35 × 27 cm / 13.8 × 10.6 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 49.00
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The 35 x 27 cm sheet lying flat, The Open Door printed at original size with white margins
  • The 35 x 27 cm sheet lying flat, The Open Door printed at original size with white margins
  • William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1844 - the complete salted paper print shown flat on white
  • Talbot, The Open Door — the 40 × 30 cm print hung above an oak sideboard
  • Detail at printed size — the broom leaning in the doorway
  • The 35 x 27 cm sheet lying flat, The Open Door printed at original size with white margins
  • William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1844 - the complete salted paper print shown flat on white
  • Talbot, The Open Door — the 40 × 30 cm print hung above an oak sideboard
  • Detail at printed size — the broom leaning in the doorway
William Henry Fox Talbot – The Open Door, 1844 | Giclée Print

William Henry Fox Talbot – The Open Door, 1844 | Giclée Print

CHF 49.00
Size

A broom leaning in a doorway, a lantern on the wall, a bridle hanging beside it, and light falling across the threshold. Nothing happens in it, and that is why it is famous: in 1844 a photograph of an ordinary back door was an argument about what pictures could be about.

The Pencil of Nature. Talbot published this plate in the first commercially issued book illustrated with photographs, and wrote beside it that a photographer often finds, in a chance ray of sunshine or a weathered oak, a subject worth recording — that the eye may see poetry where others see nothing at all. The picture is staged, of course: he arranged the broom. But the claim was serious, and every photograph of a plain thing since descends from it.

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

Scale
Original: 14.3 × 19.4 cm / 5.6 × 7.6 in — The Metropolitan Museum of Art
35 × 27 cm / 13.8 × 10.6 in — Original size, 1:1. Image 19.40 × 14.52 cm.
40 × 30 cm / 15.7 × 11.8 in — Enlarged 1.25×. Image 24.25 × 18.15 cm.

Why it stops at 1.25×. The museum's file gives 391 dpi at original size, comfortably above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. At 1.25× the print still carries 312 dpi. The floor arrives at about 1.27×, so there is no third size.

The file is the picture, edge to edge. The museum photographed this print cropped to the image — no sheet margin, no mount. So what you get is the picture as catalogued and nothing around it, and the white border on your sheet is ours, not Talbot's. Where the museum's measurements and the file disagree by a millimetre or two, we anchor on the catalogued width.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), The Open Door, before May 1844; salted paper print from a paper negative, 14.3 × 19.4 cm. Plate VI of The Pencil of Nature.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Acc. No. 2005.100.498, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen and Robert Rosenkranz Gifts, 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.

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