At
roughly the same moment as the daguerreotype made its debut, the Englishman
William Henry Fox Talbot announced a rival process that, though not yet as
refined as Daguerre’s invention, would lay the groundwork for almost all
subsequent photography until the digital age. Talbot’s process produced a
negative on fine writing paper (not yet glass or film) that could, in turn, be
used to print multiple positive photographs on paper.

The
wealthy baron and gentleman-farmer Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard was among
the earliest French artists to try his hand at Talbot’s process. Clearly
attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in
17th-century Dutch painting and its early-19th-century French revival, Humbert
de Molard posed his caretaker Louis Dodier (standing in elegant contrapposto
and wearing wooden clogs) and other workers in a tableau of rural activity at
his château at Argentelle, in Normandy.