In Deerleap Woods - A Haunt of George Meredith
Frederick H. Evans British
Not on view
Evans was attracted to two subjects difficult to treat in a highly personal manner: simple landscape and cathedral architecture. Both motifs had become banal in the works of commercial photographers of the late nineteenth century, and Evans gave them a new life. When this picture was first exhibited, the critic H. Snowden Ward wrote in Photograms of the Year 1910: "Evans in his Deerleap Woods makes his theme of two bare trunks, both flecked with sunlight, one gracefully yielding, the other straight and uncompromising. It is nothing of a subject. Few men would have attempted it, because few would have seen any beauty in it. Evans both saw and recorded the cool shade, the tranquility, the placid air, and the warm, playful sunlight." The picture, subtitled A Haunt of George Meredith, was probably taken in 1909, the year this British poet and novelist died.
