Talbot's Rouen window

On 16 May 1843, William Henry Fox Talbot, stopping in Rouen en route to Paris to try to market his calotype process, set up his camera in front of the muslin-curtained window of his room in the Hôtel de l'Angleterre (figure 1).1 Huddled deep in the darkened bedroom, he focused not on the masts of sailing vessels docked outside on the quai du Havre or the new suspension bridge that he was to record in other images, but on the plane of the window itself, with its mullions, balcony grating, curtain rods, and filigree of lace. Knowing full well that the faintly lit walls of his room would be grossly underexposed ifhe tried to capture anything of the bright outside world, Talbot persisted with this enigmatic composition, neither landscape nor still life, study of nature nor genre scene, at best a ‘picturesque imagining’ as he would later describe in The Pencil of Nature

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• The Invisible World

  Catherine Wilson•Invisible World•1995

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