On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Gate of Goodbye
Francis James Mortimer British
Not on view
Mortimer, a prominent British Pictorialist, used his darkroom skills to fuel England’s patriotic fervor during World War I. The Gate of Goodbye, his most popular and widely reproduced photograph, depicts war-bound soldiers bidding farewell to their families at London’s Victoria Station. Although such scenes were common during the war years, Mortimer’s photograph is a composite, artfully assembled from more than twenty different negatives—not an outright lie, but an ideologically motivated, aesthetically perfected exaggeration of the truth.
Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
