The Gate of Goodbye
On loan to The Met
This work of art is currently on loan to the museum.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.
Artwork Details
- Title: The Gate of Goodbye
- Artist: Francis James Mortimer (British, 1874–1944)
- Date: 1917
- Medium: Carbon print
- Dimensions: Image: 34.1 x 48.8 cm (13 7/16 x 19 3/16 in.)
Frame: 55.9 x 71.1 cm (22 x 28 in.) - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom
- Curatorial Department: Photographs