# Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey > William Henry Fox Talbot - August 1835 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/william-henry-fox-talbot/fox-talbot-latticed-window-lacock/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-15 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** William Henry Fox Talbot - **Date:** August 1835 - **Medium:** Photogenic drawing negative: paper sensitized with silver chloride (salted then silver-nitrated) and exposed in a small wooden camera - **Dimensions:** Negative image approximately 35 x 29 mm; overall mount 69 x 150 mm; dark paper surround 58 x 50 mm - **Object type:** Photograph - **Period:** British, 19th century, the invention of photography - **Current location:** National Science and Media Museum, Bradford (Science Museum Group) - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A paper negative about the size of a large postage stamp, made by William Henry Fox Talbot inside Lacock Abbey in August 1835. It shows a latticed oriel window in the house's South Gallery, and it is conventionally described as the oldest surviving camera negative in existence. Talbot's own handwritten annotation on the mount, naming the month and year, is the evidence on which that claim and his later priority dispute with Louis Daguerre both rest.When news reached London in January 1839 that Daguerre had unveiled a rival process in Paris, Talbot produced negatives like this one to prove he had been making permanent camera images almost three and a half years earlier. The two men had solved a genuinely different problem by genuinely different means, working independently and unaware of each other, and the resulting argument over who had 'invented photography' shaped how both processes were patented, licensed and adopted for the next two decades.The negative has been in the national collection since 1937, is too fragile for permanent display, and is normally shown only as a facsimile alongside one of Talbot's small wooden cameras. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **August 1835-1877** William Henry Fox Talbot `[documented]` (creation and retention) Made by Talbot at Lacock Abbey in August 1835 and retained there as part of his own working archive until his death in 1877. - **1877-1916** Charles Henry Talbot `[documented]` (inheritance) Lacock Abbey and its contents passed to Talbot's elder son, Charles Henry Talbot, on his father's death. - **1916-1934/1937** Matilda Talbot (nee Gilchrist-Clark) `[documented]` (inheritance) Charles Henry Talbot died unmarried in 1916 and left Lacock Abbey to his niece, who took the name Talbot and organized a centenary exhibition of her grandfather's photographic work in 1934. - **1934/1937-present** Science Museum / Science Museum Group (now National Science and Media Museum, Bradford) `[documented]` (gift and accession) Transferred from the Talbot family archive at Lacock to the Science Museum; catalogued 1937 with accession number 1937-361 and credit line 'Matilda Talbot'. Matilda Talbot separately gave Lacock Abbey itself to the National Trust in 1944. ## Open questions - Where exactly was this negative kept between 1835 and its 1937 transfer to the Science Museum? The Talbot family's continuous ownership is documented in outline, but no source consulted for this record details who specifically held or handled the object year to year. - What is the true date of the Metropolitan Museum's larger negative of the same window? The Met itself calls it 'probably 1835' while acknowledging the date is uncertain; it has never been resolved against the annotated Bradford negative. - Did other camera negatives from Talbot's 1835 experiments survive uncatalogued or unrecognized, given that dozens of mousetrap cameras were in simultaneous use at Lacock that summer? None has been identified as a rival to this object in the sources consulted. - Which fixing method was actually used on this specific negative? Talbot's general practice in 1835 was a strong salt solution, since Herschel's hypo suggestion came in 1839, but no source consulted confirms the fixer used on this particular sheet. - Can the roughly 200 window panes described in Talbot's own annotation still be counted today, or has fading and fragility reduced the negative's resolving detail since 1835? No current condition report was found in the sources consulted. - How and when precisely did the object move from Lacock Abbey to the Science Museum? A 1934 centenary exhibition and a 1937 accession date are both documented, but the exact circumstances of the transfer itself are not detailed in the sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] Science Museum Group Collection, 'Windows From Inside South Gallery, Lacock Abbey' (object co17291, accession 1937-361). - [2] National Science and Media Museum blog, 'The world's earliest surviving photographic negative is part of our collection' (curator Colin Harding). - [3] DPReview, 'The Beginning of Photography: The Drama of 1839'. - [4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record 282004, '[The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey]' (accession 1997.382.1, The Rubel Collection). - [5] Wikimedia Commons, File:Talbot William, The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey, 1835 or 1839.jpg (description distinguishing the Met's larger, undated negative from the annotated August 1835 negative). - [6] JSTOR Daily, 'The Daguerreotype's Famous. Why Not the Calotype?'. - [7] Cornell University Library, 'Dawn's Early Light' exhibition, 'Daguerre and Talbot'. - [8] Science Museum Group Collection, people record, 'William Henry Fox Talbot' (cp37726). - [9] Talbot Correspondence Project (Bodleian Library), '25 January 1839 - Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress' (quote on Talbot's reaction to Daguerre's announcement; content retrieved via search summary after the site's own bot-protection blocked a direct fetch - flagged for the editor to re-verify against the live page). - [10] Wikipedia, 'Henry Fox Talbot' (tertiary source, used only for the Assyriology and Society of Biblical Archaeology fact; flagged for replacement with a specialist source on Talbot's cuneiform work). - [11] Edinburgh Photographic History, 'Print made from the oldest negative in existence - The Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey' (annotation transcription). - [12] Photography Project (UK), 'Henry Fox Talbot: The First Paper Negative' (process and exposure detail). - [13] National Trust, 'History of Lacock Abbey' (provenance from Talbot through Charles Henry Talbot and Matilda Talbot to the National Trust, 1944). - [14] Wikimedia Commons, File:Latticed window at lacock abbey 1835.jpg (image metadata and licence verification via the Commons API). - [15] Wikimedia Commons, File:Talbot, latticed window.png (image metadata and licence verification via the Commons API). - [16] Wikimedia Commons, File:William Henry Fox Talbot (8385714861).jpg (image metadata and licence verification via the Commons API; portrait by Antoine Claudet, c. 1844, from the National Media Museum's Flickr Commons collection). - [17] Wikipedia, 'National Science and Media Museum' (tertiary source, used only for the sequence of the institution's own name changes in 1983, 2006 and 2017; flagged for replacement with the museum's own institutional history page). --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.