18 Dec 2015: Out of respect to busy schedules during the holiday season, I’ll try to keep these posts pleasantly brief. A fortnight ago I headed towards the Cambridge University Library in order to renew my reader’s pass. The forbidding exterior of the building belies the delights that awaits one inside. Much of my early research on Sir …

11 Dec 2015: One never quite knows where Talbot’s wide-ranging imagination will take us. The art form of cliché-verre, where a hand-drawn etching is copied onto photographic paper to make the final print is firmly associated in the art historical mind with the mid-19th c Barbizon School, particularly the works of Camille Carot, the most prolific of his …

4 Dec 2015: Sulo Lembinen of the University of Tartu has enthusiastically continued scouring Estonian sources and has already turned up additional information about Matilda Talbot’s 1939 donation of original Talbot prints; this has allowed some refinement of the information in last week’s blog. In public lectures and private conversations I am often asked provocative questions along the …