This mysterious view through the diamond-paned oriel window of Talbot's home is one of the earliest photographs in existence—a remarkable relic of the inventor's earliest attempts to make pictures solely through the action of light and chemicals. He brushed a piece of writing paper with salt and silver nitrate and placed it in a small wooden camera stationed on a mantel opposite the window for an exposure that may have lasted hours. The image is tonally reversed—a negative, though the term did not yet exist—as the paper darkened most where it recorded the bright light of the windows.

• Provenance

  Lacock Abbey; Mathilde Talbot; Harold White, Filby, Norfolk, England; [Sean Thackrey, San Francisco]; Rubel Collection; [Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photography, New York]
  
  

• Timeline of Art History (2000–present)
  Thematic Essays

  William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and the Invention of Photography

  Timelines

  Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.
• MetPublications
  Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860 (2007)

  "Inventing a New Art: Early Photographs from the Rubel Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 56, no. 4 (Spring, 1999) (1999)