[The Boulevards of Paris]

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Artist: William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800–1877)
Medium: Salted paper print
Size: Image: 16.4 × 21.4 cm (6 7/16 × 8 7/16 in.)
Culture: British
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

The fundamental virtue of the daguerreotype was seen as its perfect capture of details. In 1843 William Henry Fox Talbot boldly ventured into the home territory of his rival, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, to prove that the calotype could do the same. He carefully selected a hotel room in the center of Paris near the present Place de l’Opéra whose windows had a commanding view over the city. His description of this scene, the second plate in The Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s 1844-46 illustrated treatise on photography, was the most complete of any in his text:

“The spectator is looking to the North-east. The time is the afternoon. The sun is just quitting the range of buildings adorned with columns: its façade is already in the shade, but a single shutter standing open projects far enough forward to catch a gleam of sunshine. The weather is hot and dusty, and they have just been watering the road, which has produced two broad bands of shade upon it, which unite in the foreground, because, the road being partially under repair (as is seen from the two wheelbarrows, &c. &c.), the watering machines have been compelled to cross to the other side.”

Perhaps most marvelous of all to Talbot was the fact that “a whole forest of chimneys borders the horizon: for, the instrument chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere.”

Talbot’s Paris Townhouses with Carriages, also in the Getty Collection, offers another perspective of a Parisian street.

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