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.
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