This early photograph is one of two variant images of chess players traditionally ascribed to William Henry Fox Talbot. New research by Talbot authority Larry Schaaf casts doubt upon this attribution and suggests that the maker is more likely Nicolaas Henneman, who had worked for Talbot before establishing his own studio. In his essay "The Puzzling Chess Players", Schaaf notes that this image was included by Henneman in an 1847 prototype for a book of his photographs that was never published. Inventory numbers and stamps on other prints of The Chess Players connect the images to Henneman and his studio partnership with Thomas Malone. Schaaf also entertains the possibility that it may have been made by the French-born, London-based photographer Antoine Claudet, who is the silver–haired gentleman on the left in the present image. Schaaf’s exegesis on this photograph can be found at http://foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2016/06/03/the-puzzling-chess-players/
The question of authorship aside, the present lot possesses an immediacy not frequently seen in images made in photography’s earliest years.