alb3624342

ROGER FENTON. [Landscape with Clouds]

[Landscape with Clouds]. Artist: Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869). Dimensions: Image: 31.4 x 44.3 cm (12 3/8 x 17 7/16 in.), irregular. Date: probably 1856.
The towering figure in British photography of the 1850s, Fenton championed the medium's place among the fine arts and mastered all its genres, including architecture, landscape, reportage, still life, and tableau-vivant.  Unlike the immensely popular and widely distributed seascapes of his French friend and counterpart Gustave Le Gray, with their theatrical sleight of hand (dramatic skies printed from a second negative), Fenton's expansive cloudscapes are intensely felt private meditations upon nature, printed once and kept in his personal albums.  The descendant of Constable's cloud studies and Turner's explorations of atmosphere and light, Fenton's picture is so minimal and moving that it seems to hover between the visible and the imagined.  He infused his landscapes with a distinctly English reverence for the observable world, recognizing, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, "In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / of all my moral being.".
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Title:
[Landscape with Clouds]
Caption:
[Landscape with Clouds]. Artist: Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869). Dimensions: Image: 31.4 x 44.3 cm (12 3/8 x 17 7/16 in.), irregular. Date: probably 1856. The towering figure in British photography of the 1850s, Fenton championed the medium's place among the fine arts and mastered all its genres, including architecture, landscape, reportage, still life, and tableau-vivant. Unlike the immensely popular and widely distributed seascapes of his French friend and counterpart Gustave Le Gray, with their theatrical sleight of hand (dramatic skies printed from a second negative), Fenton's expansive cloudscapes are intensely felt private meditations upon nature, printed once and kept in his personal albums. The descendant of Constable's cloud studies and Turner's explorations of atmosphere and light, Fenton's picture is so minimal and moving that it seems to hover between the visible and the imagined. He infused his landscapes with a distinctly English reverence for the observable world, recognizing, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, "In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / of all my moral being.".
Technique/material:
Salted paper print from glass negative
Museum:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Credit:
Album / Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Releases:
Model: No - Property: No
Rights questions?
Image size:
4293 x 3064 px | 37.6 MB
Print size:
36.3 x 25.9 cm | 14.3 x 10.2 in (300 dpi)