Within a few years of announcing his invention of photography on paper, William Henry Fox Talbot explored a wide array of applications for the new art. For some pictures, he turned his camera toward subjects traditionally thought suitable for artistic representation—scenes of picturesque beauty or sites of historic interest. For others, he arranged objects or people in aesthetic tableaux. For still others, such as this one, Talbot must surely have viewed the world through his camera and found an abstract composition that he would not have envisaged as a picture without the framing and spatial flattening characteristic of photographic observation.