William Henry Fox Talbot – Wild Fennel, 1841–42 | Giclée Print

A frond of wild fennel laid on sensitised paper and left in the sun. Every filament of it printed itself pale against the ground, thread by thread, down to hairs finer than a pencil could follow. Nobody drew this and no camera was pointed at it. The plant is its own draughtsman, at the exact size it grew.

1841–42. Talbot called the process photogenic drawing: silver salts on writing paper, an object laid on top, sunlight, then a bath to arrest it. What comes out is reversed — pale where the plant lay, dark where the light reached — and that reversal is the whole invention, because from such a sheet a second can be printed, and from that a third, without end. Anna Atkins would take the idea, swap the chemistry for Prussian blue and publish the first book illustrated with photographs. This is the same gesture, in sepia.

Why this sheet. We measure the separation between motif and ground before admitting a work, as ΔE across the Lab colour space. Hokusai's Great Wave comes to 41.6 and our floor is 23. This sheet measures 44.0 — the strongest reading of any Talbot we have examined. White filaments on a deep brown ground, with almost nothing in between.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of a salted paper print, 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: 22.7 × 18.7 cm / 8.9 × 7.4 in — The Metropolitan Museum of Art
40 × 30 cm / 15.7 × 11.8 in — Original size, 1:1. Image 22.70 × 18.86 cm.
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Enlarged 1.35×. Image 30.65 × 25.47 cm.

Why it stops at 1.35×. The museum's file gives 425 dpi across the sheet at original size, comfortably above the 300 dpi we hold as the floor, and nothing is upscaled. Enlarged, that reserve is spent: at 1.35× the print still carries 315 dpi, and beyond about 1.4× it would fall through the floor. So there are two sizes and no third.

The corners are cut off, and they stay that way. Talbot's sheet is not a rectangle — all four corners are clipped at an angle, and the museum's white mount shows behind them. We print the rectangle that contains the sheet, so those four pale triangles come with it. That shape is the object. Cropping inward to a clean rectangle would take the fennel with it.

Provenance
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877), [Wild Fennel], 1841–42; salted paper print, 18.7 × 22.7 cm, corners clipped.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Acc. No. 2005.100.260, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 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.
Anna Atkins's cyanotypes — the same idea a year later, in Prussian blue.