How you can use this image
This image can be used for non-commercial research or private study purposes, and other UK exceptions to copyright permitted to users based in the United Kingdom under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended and revised. Any other type of use will need to be cleared with the rights holder(s).
Review the copyright credit lines that are located underneath the image, as these indicate who manages the copyright (©) within the artwork, and the photographic rights within the image.
The collection that owns the artwork may have more information on their own website about permitted uses and image licensing options.
Review our guidance pages which explain how you can reuse images, how to credit an image and how to find images in the public domain or with a Creative Commons licence available.
Notes
Add or edit a note on this artwork that only you can see. You can find notes again by going to the ‘Notes’ section of your account.
This portrait was possibly copied from a photograph and shows Fox Talbot holding photographic apparatus, with Lacock in the background. As a pioneer of photography, Fox Talbot is perhaps the most renowned owner of Lacock. Whilst on honeymoon at Lake Como, Italy, he was frustrated at his own artistic inability to capture the surroundings; this was the start of his experimentation with photography. Unfortunately, the Frenchman Louis Daguerre was the first to make public his own photographic images. Fox Talbot was something of a 'universal man' and was also a classicist, geologist, mathematician, physicist, botanist and astronomer. He was the son of William Davenport Talbot (1764–1800) and Elizabeth Fox-Strangways, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester.
The artist worked for Wedgwood as a ceramics designer, was a mural painter, and specialised in clinical and pathological drawings.
National Trust, Lacock Abbey, Fox Talbot Museum and Village
near Chippenham
Title
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), MP
Date
1951
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
H 127 x W 101.5 cm
Accession number
996349
Acquisition method
commissioned
Work type
Painting