[Ruins of the Monastery Cloisters, Yuste]
Charles Clifford British
Not on view
One of the legion of British photographers dispersed throughout the world during the early days of the medium, Clifford had the distinction of serving as official photographer to Queen Isabella II of Spain. The patronage was a blessing, for it facilitated his access to the great architectural monuments of Spain and gave him freedom to practice his art.
Begun in the fifteenth century, the Hieronymite monastery of Yuste was where the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V chose to retire in 1557, one year before his death. As a native Englishman, Clifford was imbued with Romantic notions of such ruins-of their symbolic evidence of the grandeur of human aspirations and of their inevitably temporal nature.
