Articles of China

"Articles of China" is a salted paper print made from a paper negative, created before January 1844 and held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This work belongs to the very earliest era of photography, when the medium was still a startling novelty. The salted paper print process — pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot — involved coating paper with silver chloride, exposing it through a paper negative, and fixing the image with salt. The result is a warm, slightly soft image with a luminous, almost painterly quality quite unlike the sharp daguerreotype popular at the same time.

It is worth noting that the artist listed, William Henry Singer (1868–1943), was an American painter known for Impressionist-style oil works. Since this photograph was made before January 1844, Singer would not yet have been born, making the attribution almost certainly a cataloging error or confusion with another artist — most likely Fox Talbot himself, whose series of salted paper prints at the Met includes nearly identical works such as "A Fruit Piece," "Bust of Patroclus," and "Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire." Regardless of attribution, this image represents a landmark moment: using photography to document domestic objects, transforming humble china into subjects worthy of careful artistic attention.