[Two Hawthorn Leaves and a Fig Leaf]]

The naive simplicity of this image is one of its attractions today. It is a straightforward rendering of three artifacts of nature, contrasting the size and outline of the leaves within the confines of a sheet of writing paper. By February 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot had freely published the manipulatory details of his process, which of course encouraged the curious to try it for themselves, often using the same subjects and types of paper that he employed. In later years, as firsthand memories faded and were lost, it became common to attribute any early paper photograph to Talbot.

This negative must have had now-unknown companions, for it is mounted on a sheet of album paper cryptically titled in an unidentified nineteenth-century hand “4 photographs by Mr. Fox Talbot.” That in itself would not constitute proof of authorship, but this example was also signed and dated in ink on the verso by Talbot. It almost certainly represents a presentation piece he made up for someone.

One of Talbot’s largest difficulties throughout 1839 remained the production and distribution of enough examples so that people could more readily understand what he had invented. The exceptionally poor weather that year limited the number of pictures that could be produced, and those that were accomplished passed through many hands and were repeatedly exposed to daylight. In spite of all his efforts in that first public year of photography, surviving examples made those first twelve months are relatively scarce.

Larry Schaaf, William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 24. ©2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.