Barely five years after first showing his
invention—photography on paper—to the public, the Victorian polymath Henry
Talbot took on an ambitious subject. Still-life
painters frequently included cut crystal or glassware in their elaborate fruit
or flower compositions, in part as a demonstration of virtuoso technique,
depicting a transparent object made visible only as reflected and refracted
light.

Taken in broad
daylight, this image was featured in Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), the first commercially published
book illustrated with photographs. In the text that accompanied a similar
photograph titled Articles of China, Talbot
wrote that “the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector . . . might
be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a
written inventory.” Furthermore, he recognized how such pictures could provide
“mute testimony” as legal evidence should a thief steal one of the items on
view.