Articles of China
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
1843-44
- Medium
- Salted paper print
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image: 13.7 × 18.2 cm (5 7/16 × 7 3/16 in.); Paper: 18.7 × 22.4 cm (7 3/8 × 8 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- The Mary and Leigh Block Endowment Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
One of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot also produced the first commercially published book to feature photographic illustrations. The Pencil of Nature, issued in six volumes between 1844 and 1846, included Articles of China as plate three of the first volume. Talbot used this image to extol the practical virtues of the new art, claiming that “the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way.” Moreover, he argued presciently, if a thief should take the treasures, such an image could provide a new kind of evidentiary record in court.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
