House Detectives & Royal Exchanges

30 Sep 2016: Readers may recall that a few months ago I posted some observations and musings about Nicolaas Henneman’s printing operation that he had set up at Kensal Green, just outside London and its heavily polluted air and enfeebled sunlight. Amazingly, the architectural plans for modifying Monument House in the early 1850s survive, revealing an unusual configuration …

A Birthday, In Memoriam, & Building a House

23 Sep 2016: Last year about this time we celebrated the 175th birthday of the Calotype. This was Talbot’s discovery within a branch of his exploratory research that he could build on the existence of a latent image. In his first process, photogenic drawing, the sun had to do all the work of reducing the light sensitive silver …

Thomas Moore & the Ladies of Lacock

16 Sep 2016: Last week’s Vexations of a Poet’s Heart briefly explored the close relationship between William Henry Fox Talbot and his neighbor, Thomas Moore, the radical and wildly popular Irish poet. It was not only Henry who was familiar with Moore. Indeed, the poet met Lady Elisabeth and Captain Feilding before young Talbot had attained the age …

Thomas Moore: Vexations of a Poet’s Heart

9 Sep 2016: I have a good friend (a conservator, and I shall say no more) who has the lovely subconscious facility of combining words into new and wonderfully expressive ones. She once expressed concern about a ‘pondery’ – the state of pondering a quandary – a really descriptive and useful word that I think should be given …

Summer Pleasures: Good Day Sunshine – No. 4

2 Sep 2016: Guest post by Brian Liddy In previous posts I found myself recoiling from the effects of harsh sunlight, so as August slips by and the summer mellows I find myself withdrawing indoors to contemplate sunlight streaming through a window. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Batchen’s recent post has given me the courage to choose images which are far …