[Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh]

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Artist: William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800–1877)
Medium: Photoglyphic engraving
Size: Plate: 11.3 × 12.3 cm (4 7/16 × 4 13/16 in.)
Culture: British
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

In a Literary Gazette of March 1839, just two months after he first publicly disclosed the art of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot confessed that the images made by the process “differed indeed from those now produced by artists.” He recognized, however, that his art was young and stressed that the difference was the same “as an inferior handwriting differs from a good one—in execution, but not in principle.”

His earliest experiments in translating photographs into printer’s ink were a primitive form of handwriting. These examples lacked the ability to carry detail over broad areas and to preserve the delicate middle tones. He kept working at this, though, and increasingly spent time around Edinburgh, the fine-printing capital of Britain. In 1858 he announced his improved photoglyphic engraving process.

His printing plates were strictly photographic—no hand retouching was involved—but he had improved their tonal range immensely. Talbot worked at this photogravure process for more than twenty-five years and was writing about it in the last days of his life. The dream he established in Italy in 1833, when trying to master the camera lucida, a drawing tool with a prismatic lens, had been realized. Nature had become his drawing mistress.

St. Matthew’s Episcopal Chapel (or Rosslyn Chapel), begun around 1450 but never completed, was the church for the college started by William Sinclair, the third earl of Orkney, about seven miles south of Edinburgh. It is noted for its decorative stone carving, which covers nearly every surface. The fantastic column on the right is the “Prentice Pillar,” so called because of the apocryphal story of the apprentice who carved it, who was then murdered by the jealous master mason.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.