William Henry Fox Talbot – Two Plant Specimens, 1839 | Giclée Print

Two plants laid on a sheet of sensitised paper and carried into the sun. A honeysuckle branch down the left, in flower and still carrying its leaves; a single umbel on a long stalk to the right, opened flat. Where the plants lay, the paper stayed pale. Everywhere else it darkened. Talbot did not draw any of this, and he did not photograph it either — there was no camera in the room.

1839. This is the year photography was announced, and this is what Talbot had to show. He called the process photogenic drawing: silver salts on writing paper, an object laid on top, sunlight, then a bath to stop it going further. What comes out is reversed — pale where the object lay, dark where it did not — and that reversal is the whole invention. From such a sheet a second sheet can be printed, and from that a third, without end. The photograms of 1839 look like botanical specimens. They are actually the negative, four years before anyone had a settled word for it.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a photogenic drawing, made with pigment inks. It is not a photogram and is not sold as one — a photogram is a unique object made in sunlight, and Talbot's are in museums.

Scale
Original: sheet 18.1 × 22.1 cm / 7.1 × 8.7 in — The Art Institute of Chicago
30 × 40 cm / 11.8 × 15.7 in — Original size, 1:1. Image 18.10 × 22.10 cm.
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Enlarged, 1.75× original. Image 31.68 × 38.68 cm.

At original size the picture is exactly as large as the paper Talbot laid his plants on — small enough to hold in two hands. Enlarged, the fibres of the 1839 writing paper come up, and so does the cloudiness in the ground. The Chicago file gives 810 dpi at original size and 463 dpi enlarged, both far above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor. Nothing is upscaled. 2.1× is our ceiling for photograms; here the sheet runs out before the file does, at 1.75×, and we would rather keep a generous white border than fill it.

The sheet has cut corners. Talbot trimmed the paper across all four corners, so the object is an octagon rather than a rectangle. We reproduce the rectangle that contains it, which means the four corners show the cream mount the museum keeps it on. That is not a fault in the file — it is the shape of the object, and cropping inward to avoid it would cost a centimetre of the picture on every side.

Where this sheet ends. Along the four straight edges the museum's photograph runs flush with the paper: the very edge of Talbot's sheet is not in the file, and therefore not in your print. Measured in ten bands along each edge, the mount appears only in the corner triangles and nowhere between them. What you get is the whole photogram; what is missing is the last hair's breadth of its border.

It is a quiet sheet, and we would rather say so. Pale plants on a rose-brown ground that has faded unevenly in 187 years — darker towards the edges, cloudy in places, with a patch of foxing at the upper left and a line of faint handwriting across the top right. Measured, the separation between the plants and the ground is ΔE 22.7 against Hokusai's Great Wave at 41.6. That is the lower end of what we sell. It is a whisper of a picture rather than a shout, and if you want a wall that carries across a room, this is not that sheet. The paper tone is printed as it is; nothing is corrected.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), Two Plant Specimens, 1839; photogenic drawing, image and paper 22.1 × 18.1 cm, mount 29 × 21.5 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Acc. No. 1972.325 — Edward E. Ayer Endowment in memory of Charles L. Hutchinson.
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.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how every size in this shop is decided, and why the sheet stops this one at 1.75×.
Anna Atkins's cyanotypes — the same method four years later, in Prussian blue.