2 Albert Terrace
Feb 4/54
Dear Sir
In looking over my papers, now that I have a little leisure to attend to my own affairs I find a note from you which ought to have been earlier answered.
Most likely you will have received the information which you wrote for, as immediately on receipt of your note, I sent to the man who wanted your pictures, desiring him to send you the account of expense &c Wanting however personally to pay my respects to you I did not write & so have been involuntarily wanting in proper attention to your communication
I trust that a sufficient excuse for this oversight will be found in the constant distraction caused by the necessity of attending to a multiplicity of small & confusing details connected with the exhibition in Suffolk St & the affairs of the Society. <1>
Your will have seen by the works shown in our exhibition that we have not been standing still during the last year & that the different applications of your discovery are being most skilfully practised. I feel however in my own experience the great necessity there is for a surer method than the usual one of producing positive copies
No great use can be made of the art until the experiments <2> wh. are making by yourself & Mr Niepce <3> come to a perfect result. If we could be sure that by the exercise of taste & watchfulness we could always produce in the usual way good positive pictures, of agreable tint & permanently fixed, this process of printing wd perhaps be no slower of or more difficult than the way in wh. proof impressions of good [illegible deletion] engraving are struck off, but at present the process of printing is uncertain both in its theory & its results
In the French experiments, the result obtained appears to be not the means of engraving by means of light, but a method of increasing the precision & lessening the duration of the work of the skilled engraver
I hope that the honour of finally solving this question will by your researches be won for the country.
It would be a rare good fortune for the same hand to have commenced & completed the structure of photographic Art.
I am Sir Yours obedly
Roger Fenton
H. F. Talbot Esq
[envelope:]
H. F. Talbot Esq
Lacock Abbey
Chippenham
Notes:
1. In 1854 the Photographic Society of London, of which Fenton was a member, held an exhibition at the Gallery of the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall.
2. Fenton is referring to WHFT's developmental work on photographic engraving, a forerunner to photogravure. Many other researchers, such as Niépce, were working on different approaches to reproducing photographs in printer's ink. Within two years, Fenton himself became one of the founders of the Patent Photo-Galvanographic Company, which was soon shut down, however, because it had clearly violated WHFT's patent.
3. Claude Felix Abel Niepce de Saint–Victor (1805–1870), French photographer and nephew of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), photographic inventor. Niepce de Saint–Victor worked on Photographic Engraving. [See Doc. No: 06765].