The Boulevards of Paris

William Henry Fox Talbot

National Gallery of Art

We look across a street at the façade of a five-story building with a pitched roof in this square sepia-toned photograph. Vertical rectangular windows are spaced along the lowest two levels of the building, which appears to be constructed with large rectangular stones. There is a squat, arched window over a dark opening at the bottom center. The façade of the next two stories is smooth. Tall, narrow arched windows line the third story, and the fourth story has smaller rectangular windows with shutters. Columns frame the central bank of windows in the third and fourth stories. Dormers of the fifth level protrude from the low pitched roof, which nearly reaches the top edge of the photograph. Another house is visible through a narrow alleyway to our right, and another shorter house is cropped by the right edge. Some details of the three horse-drawn carriages lining the street in front of the houses are blurry. The image is surrounded by a wide black band with uneven edges.