- The Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge
Sheet: 7 3/16 × 8 7/8 in. (18.3 × 22.5 cm)
Explore Further
A graduate of Cambridge University with wide-ranging
interests including chemistry, mathematics, and botany, Egyptology and Assyriology,
philosophy, philology, and art history, Talbot was nonetheless a frustrated artist.
In the late 1830s, he devised a means of making pictures with light and
chemistry alone. The basic principle of his process— creating a camera negative
from which multiple positive images could be printed—remained at the core of
nearly all subsequent photography until the digital age.
Only a decade old in
this photograph, the Bridge of Sighs at St. John’s College is named after the
similarly shaped covered bridge in Venice.
Provenanceex-collection Lacock Abbey; Robert Hershkowitz Ltd., Sussex.
Bought by Manfred Heiting from Robert Hershkowitz Limited, Sussex, on 4/30/1986.
Exhibition History"Wenn Berlin Biarritz wäre . . . ", Museum Folkwang, Essen, 2001;
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
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