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[Landscape with Clouds]

Roger Fenton British
probably 1856
Not on view
The towering figure in British photography of the 1850s, Fenton championed the medium's place among the fine arts and mastered all its genres, including architecture, landscape, reportage, still life, and tableau-vivant. Unlike the immensely popular and widely distributed seascapes of his French friend and counterpart Gustave Le Gray, with their theatrical sleight of hand (dramatic skies printed from a second negative), Fenton's expansive cloudscapes are intensely felt private meditations upon nature, printed once and kept in his personal albums. The descendant of Constable's cloud studies and Turner's explorations of atmosphere and light, Fenton's picture is so minimal and moving that it seems to hover between the visible and the imagined. He infused his landscapes with a distinctly English reverence for the observable world, recognizing, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, "In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / of all my moral being."

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: [Landscape with Clouds]
  • Artist: Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869)
  • Date: probably 1856
  • Medium: Salted paper print from glass negative
  • Dimensions: Image: 31.4 x 44.3 cm (12 3/8 x 17 7/16 in.), irregular
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, Curator's Discretionary Grant from The Judith Rothschild Foundation, and Thomas Walther Gift, 1997
  • Object Number: 1997.382.35
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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On the Beach, Hythe
Roger Fenton
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Cossack Bay, Balaklava, Roger Fenton British, Salted paper print from glass negative
Cossack Bay, Balaklava
Roger Fenton
1855
Laughing Satyr, Roger Fenton British, Salted paper print from glass negative
Laughing Satyr
Roger Fenton
1854–58
Birth of St. John, Roger Fenton British, Albumen silver print
Birth of St. John
Roger Fenton
1857
The Temple. Collection of Antiquities, Roger Fenton British, Albumen silver print from glass negative
The Temple. Collection of Antiquities
Roger Fenton
1850s

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