Clothing and Landscape in Victorian England by Worth Rachel

Author:Worth, Rachel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Fig. 5.4Bringing Home the May (1862) by Henry Peach Robinson

Born in the old Shropshire town of Ludlow, Robinson was apprenticed at the age of 14 to a printer, stationer and bookseller for five years. In his twenties, he began practising photography, although he had held ambitions to be an artist, spending much of the time after his apprenticeship was completed drawing and painting (as well as during what leisure hours he had in his first job as a bookseller’s assistant in Bromsgrove in Birmingham). But he never managed to persuade his parents that he could make a satisfactory livelihood as an artist. His interest in, and approach to, photography, however, can be seen in the light of this underlying interest in painting. Many of his friends were painters and he became connected to some through the matches made by his children: his elder son Ralph, for example, married Janet Spence Reid, daughter of John Robertson Reid, the Scottish painter of genre, landscape and coastal scenes. Robinson viewed the photograph as essentially a work of art, which could convey his ideas about the picturesque. Unsurprisingly, he was an admirer of the work of Myles Birket Foster, whose work also perpetuated images of an idyllic rural England. In The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, Robinson maintained that ‘Mr Foster’s drawings have been especially worthy of the study of the photographer, his genre and landscape subjects being of the kind very possible in photography.’28

While working in Leamington Spa in the early 1850s, Robinson first became interested in photography, subscribing to the Journal of the Photographic Society from its commencement in 1853, and successfully practising the calotype process. The friendship and encouragement he received from photographer Hugh Welch Diamond persuaded him to devote his career to the medium and he ran a professional photographic studio first in Leamington Spa, from 1857 to 1864, and then, from 1868 following a period of illness, in Tunbridge Wells. The majority of Robinson’s pictures for exhibition were rural in theme. In addition to the photographs, we also have his critique of the medium – a theory of photography based on the aesthetics of the picturesque movement in the arts.29 Robinson devoted much of his major literary work, Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), to an account of how the real and the ideal could be associated in one photograph, and to emphasizing the importance of the picturesque:

It is an old canon of art, that every scene worth painting must have something of the sublime, the beautiful or the picturesque. By its nature, photography can make no pretensions to represent the first, but beauty can be represented by its means and picturesqueness has never had so perfect an interpreter.30

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