Important relationships

Fox Talbot invented his ‘photogenic drawing’ process in 1834 and ten years later published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. There is nothing like Elisabeth Vellacott’s drawings to make you impatient with Fox Talbot’s terms. Photography, which freezes an instant in an instant, is neither nature’s pencil nor any sort of drawing. The more you study Vellacott’s delicate drawings of English and Welsh landscapes, the more you become aware of active, stretched-out time, the time nature has already taken to create this motif and the time taken by the artist to draw it, during which nature is still alive and changeable. This is even more true of her drawings of flowers and plants, with their much briefer time-span, made in her old age when she could no longer leave her house near Huntingdon for the Welsh hills or the shores of Anglesey and the Scillies.