About This Image

Early untrimmed Calotype or Talbotype with Lacock Abbey number L691 in black ink on verso.

Kenilworth Castle is one of the great historical sites of the United Kingdom. First built in the 1120s and a royal castle for most of its history, it was expanded by King John, John of Gaunt and Henry V. In 1563 Elizabeth I granted it to her favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who converted the castle into a lavish palace fit to entertain his queen.

Although the castle’s fortifications were dismantled in 1650, many of the buildings remain unaltered since Elizabeth I's reign, and the spectacular ruins reveal much of Kenilworth's medieval and Tudor past.

On May 30, 2015 Larry Schaaf wrote about this print after viewing it in New York: "As I outlined briefly, LA691 belongs to a substantial group of photographs that came out of Lacock Abbey but certainly were not by Talbot. They have a distinctive approach and cropping and at one time I thought they were by Thomas Damant Eaton of Norwich. Now I am pretty sure that they are not, but I keep his name pinned to them just to keep the group together.

"Talbot loaned six 'near' and one 'distant' view of 'large' negatives to Henneman in May 1848. This might be from one of them. The image is Schaaf 3514 in my Catalogue Raisonne. The waxed negative for your print is in the NMeM, 1937-2505. There were several prints at Lacock Abbey in the 1960s, but yours is the only one that I know of out in the wild."

Schaaf later wrote an article with thoughts that this image and other unattributed ones in the Talbot archives might be attributed to Norwich calotypist David Kinnebrook (https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2016/05/06/david-kinnebrook-calotypist-sheep-farmer/). The date of the negative for this image, according to the Talbot database is sometime between August 1, 1835 and February 20, 1848.

Provenance: Lacock Abbey; Private Dealer Robert Hershkowitz; Andrew Smith Gallery.

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