Winter Trees Reflected in a Pond (1841–42): Art, History and Details
Winter Trees Reflected in a Pond at the Cleveland Museum of Art: 1841–42, salted paper print from calotype negative. Explore the work's context, creator attribution and collection history.
Winter Trees Reflected in a Pond (1841–42) 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:
Talbot captured tree branches flawlessly mirrored on the glassy surface of the pond at his family seat, the 13th-century Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. A longer exposure, or a lusher season, would have risked a blurred image. The result was a radically abstract composition for its time—a starkly beautiful landscape, as expressive and personal as any painting.
Object facts
- Title: Winter Trees Reflected in a Pond
- Date: 1841–42
- Creator attribution: William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877)
- Culture: England, 19th century
- Type: Photograph
- Technique: salted paper print from calotype negative
- Dimensions: Image: 16.4 x 19.1 cm (6 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.); Paper: 19.8 x 24.8 cm (7 13/16 x 9 3/4 in.); Matted: 40.6 x 50.8 cm (16 x 20 in.)
- Collection: PH - British 19th Century
- Department: Photography
- Accession number: 2006.4
A detail from the museum
Talbot made this image just a few years after he invented the photograph on paper.
Collection credit
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
Further reading listed by the museum
- Solender, Katie. "The Hinson Perspective." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 51, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 22-24.
- Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.
- Tannenbaum, Barbara. “From Long Shot to Close-up: A brief history of the photography collection.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 63, no. 1 (2023): 30-33.
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.
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