Articles of Glass (1844): Art, History and Details

Articles of Glass (1844) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Pursuing such diverse interests as language, mathematics, botany, and optics, William Henry Fox Talbot was a prominent scholar and scientist. In 1839 he invented the first system of positive and negative photography—the calotype process. The basis of all modern photography, the calotype's paper negative made possible the infinite reproduction of prints from a single negative. In Articles of Glass, three rows of sparkling glass objects are isolated against a dark background, illustrating the new medium's ability to capture the nuances of light and record reality. A remarkable technical and aesthetic achievement, the image testifies to Talbot's artistry and classical sensibilities, expressed through his use of symmetry and a central focus. This image was included in Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844), one of the first books illustrated with actual photographic prints.

Object facts

• Title: Articles of Glass
• Date: 1844
• Creator attribution: William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from calotype negative
• Dimensions: Image: 13.2 x 15.1 cm (5 3/16 x 5 15/16 in.); Paper: 18.6 x 23 cm (7 5/16 x 9 1/16 in.); Matted: 40.6 x 50.8 cm (16 x 20 in.)
• Collection: PH - British 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1992.121

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (1993): 38-79.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.