Roger Fenton’s Nature Morte: The Pull of Sculpture

Abstract

In 1860, Roger Fenton exhibited a distinctive set of photographic still lifes. Little did viewers of the time know that these would be among his last photographs. Technically accomplished, large in format and expensively priced, the prints of fruit and flowers – some including plaster figurines – stretched the limits of the photographic medium by transforming the look of monochrome. Although in some ways strikingly atypical, in their rendering the ‘black and white’ medium newly commensurate with a popular genre, the sumptuous still lifes perpetuate a vital connection with the medium of sculpture characteristic of Fenton’s earlier photographs. That connection emerges in the propensity of such photographs to petrify – turn to stone as it were – those objects they capture while simultaneously holding their potential for subsequent metamorphosis. Such a quality of transformation, most obviously present in Fenton’s photographs of antiquities in the British Museum, is also at work in his landscapes. Indeed, as the natural world is petrified in his views of north Wales, Fenton highlights the implicit metamorphosis within the apparent stasis, or characteristic immobility, of the photographic image.

Keywords:

• Roger Fenton (1819–69)
• James Bridge Davidson (1824–85)
• classical sculpture
• British Museum
• north Wales
• still life
• metamorphoses
• Victorian Photography

Notes

1. 1 – Heinrich Schwarz, Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences, ed. William E. Parker, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1987, 84.

2. 2 – In another of Fenton’s photographs of the gallery taken on the same day, Gallery of Antiquities, Student Day, two of the same artists appear with their positions altered. The female figure occupies an easel on the right, the cross-legged male is missing, while another male, possibly a museum attendant, stands half-visible in the doorway. This image was published in The Stereoscopic Magazine, 2:19 (January 1860), 31–34.

3. 3 – The post was formally approved by the Trustees in 1853, and in March 1854 the terms of his engagement for two months were approved. As Valerie Lloyd points out: ‘he came to the post with excellent endorsements including that of Sir Charles Wheatstone, Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Kings College and Vice President of the Photographic Society’. Valerie Lloyd, Roger Fenton, Photographer of the 1850s, London: Yale University Press 1988, 11. But for the Trustees of the museum, largely owing to its financial demands, the post appears to have been somewhat problematical from the beginning. See British Museum, Minutes of the Committee of Trustees, 8604, 10 September 1853. It was interrupted from June 1854 to February 1856 by Fenton’s preparations for and photographic expedition to the Crimea.

4. 4 – Sarah Greenough, ‘“A New Starting Point”: Roger Fenton’s Life’, in Gordon Baldwin, Malcolm Daniel and Sarah Greenough, All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2004, 27.

5. 5 – For a detailed discussion of the objects in the Townley collection see, in particular, Henry Ellis, The British Museum: The Townley Gallery, vol. 1, London: Charles Knight and Co. 1836, 163–97, esp. 164. The most well-known statues in Townley’s collection – not visible in Fenton’s Gallery of Antiquities – were the ‘Venus’ found at Ostia in 1776, the celebrated ‘Discobolus’, photographed separately by Fenton, and the female bust commonly called ‘Clytie’ bought at Naples from the Lorrenzano Palace in 1772.

6. 6 – Expenses for the photographic room totalled £13,416 for the financial year ending March 1857. See British Museum, General Accounts of Receipts and Expenditure, 1857.

7. 7 – Mario Naves, ‘Fenton’s Photographs Expose Sublime, Ghostly Landscapes’, New York Observer (22 August 2005), 28.

8. 8 – Fenton had photographed cathedrals from 1852 when he made salt prints from paper negatives. See Gordon Baldwin, ‘In Pursuit of Architecture’, in Baldwin, Daniel, and Greenhough, All the Mighty World, 64. At this earlier point in his career, however, he appeared more interested in their exteriors. And, while in the photographs of Wells he included an exterior shot, the interiors – such as with those of Salisbury – appear to have been taken from the perspective of an interest in highlighting the sculptures.

9. 9 – The story of Pygmalion and Galatea, and the metaphor of a statue so life-like it might step from its pedestal, was popular with writers and artists of antiquity and, following Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1567 (London: Willyam Seres), the theme became popular with English writers and artists. The story of Niobe, although less well known, captured the interest of nineteenth-century writers.

10. 10 – See Lindsay Smith, ‘The Wont of Photography, or the Pleasure of Mimesis’, in Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2010, 65–86.

11. 11 – Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984, 134.

12. 12 – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang 1981, 3.

13. 13 – Ibid., 5–6.

14. 14 – Smith, ‘The Wont of Photography’, 67.

15. 15 – Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6.

16. 16 – James Bridge Davidson, The Conway in the Stereoscope. Illustrated by Roger Fenton Esq. MA. Vice-President of the Photographic Society, with Notes Descriptive and Historical, London: Lovell Reeve 1860.

17. 17 – The plates in The Conway in the Stereoscope, listed in order, are as follows: Caerhun; Llyn-y-Afrange, on Beaver Pool; Pont-y-Pair; Falls of the Lluguy; Miners’ Bridge and the Lluguy; Rocks in the Lluguy; Pool in the Lluguy; Rocks in the Lledr; View in Glyn-Lledr; Moel Siabod; Tan Aldrach; Island in the Lledr; Pont-y-pant; Down the Lledr; Double Bridge on the Machno; Pool of the Machno; and Fordd Nevin.

18. 18 – Davidson, The Conway in the Stereoscope, 1.

19. 19 – Ibid., 2.

20. 20 – Ibid.

21. 21 – Ibid.

22. 22 – Graham Smith, ‘H. Fox Talbot’s “Scotch Views” for Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845)’, in The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, ed. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir, London: I. B. Tauris 2012, 17.

23. 23 – Davidson, The Conway in the Stereoscope, 159.

24. 24 – Ibid., 121.

25. 25 – Ibid.

26. 26 – Ibid., 122.

27. 27 – Ibid., 123.

28. 28 – Ibid.

29. 29 – Ibid., 162.

30. 30 – Ibid.

31. 31 – William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes, ed. W. Minto, vol. 1, London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. 1892, 250.

32. 32 – Mike Weaver, ‘Roger Fenton: Landscape and Still Life’, in British Photography in the Nineteenth Century, the Fine Art Tradition, ed. Mike Weaver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989, 105.

33. 33 – Lloyd, Roger Fenton, 20.

34. 34 – Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, Tate Britain, London, 12 September 2012–13 January 2013; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 17 February–19 May 2023; and State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Moscow, 10 June–30 September 2013. See Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, ed. Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, London: Tate Publishing 2012.

35. 35 – There were an additional five photographs depicting game, making forty-eight in total. Fenton had exhibited Spoils of Wood and Stream at the seventh exhibition of the Photographic Society in 1860. It was priced at twelve shillings and Pam Roberts believes the high price reflected the large size of the print: ‘the large quantity of silver in the print, and the gold chloride toning’. Pam Roberts, ‘Roger Fenton and the Still-life Tradition’, in Baldwin, Daniel, and Greenough, All the Mighty World, 91.

36. 36 – Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989, 98.

37. 37 – Fenton, writing in 1852 about the many benefits of the Photographic Society in Paris, including the disaggregation of making negatives from generating prints, refers to the gradations of monochrome as colour: ‘For a small charge, the positive pictures are here printed off, and fixed, so as to present any colour, or gradation of colour and tone that may be previously decided upon by the owner of the negative’. Roger Fenton, ‘Photography in France’, The Chemist III (29 February 1852), 221–2. See also Lindsay Smith, ‘“Thinking Blues”: The Memory of Colour in Nineteenth-century Photography’, in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002, 55–74.

38. 38 – Roberts, ‘Roger Fenton and the Still-life Tradition’, 93.

39. 39 – Ibid., 94.

40. 40 – ‘London Photographic Society’s Exhibition’, British Journal of Photography (15 January 1861), 37.

41. 41 – ‘Photography at the International Exhibition’, Photographic Journal (15 July 1862), 79–80. See also ‘London Photographic Society’s Exhibition’, British Journal of Photography (15 January 1861), 37.

42. 42 – ‘Exhibition of the Photographic Society’, Art Journal (February 1861), 47. The previous year, the Art Journal had complained about the inclusion of what it regarded as an inflated price of the prints in the catalogue. While claiming the profession of photographer to be an ‘honourable one’ it simultaneously undercut such an opinion. Criticising the mechanical reproductive capacity of photography as exempt from labour on the part of a photographer, the reviewer questioned the justification for the price of the photographs: ‘We have never seen the selling of a picture in the Royal Academy catalogue. […] But there is no parallel between the sale privately of a picture, which has been the labour of months, or it may be of years, and the sale of photographs, which can be multiplied at will, and of which the finest specimens by Mr. Roger Fenton are ticketed at 12s’. ‘Exhibition of the Photographic Society’, Art Journal (March 1860), 72.

43. 43 – The considerable technical feat of the still lifes appears to have passed by this reviewer. As Roberts indicates, ‘almost all Fenton’s still life photographs’ appear in ‘three formats’, thus indicating that he used ‘three and maybe four’ cameras: a ‘six-lensed stereo camera with Petzval lenses, a large-format 20 16-inch-plate camera (and possibly even a larger one that took 24 18-inch plates), and a smaller-format 15 15-inch-plate camera’. Roberts, ‘Roger Fenton and the Still-life Tradition’, 95. Fenton’s Fruit with Ivory and Silver Tankard was featured in The Stereoscope Magazine, 2:28 (October 1860), 117–18.

44. 44 – Bann, The True Vine, 19.

45. 45 – Weaver, ‘Roger Fenton: Landscape and Still Life’, 116. Weaver also discusses Still Life with St. Hubert Cup and Chinese Curiosities and Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup in terms of their Bacchic and emblematic significance (ibid., 118) and he notes how in Ivory Cup and Fruit ‘Fenton shows how essentially the same motifs can be used to convey a quite different message: The sensual joys of the grape lead to the emptiness of the over-turned tankard’ (ibid., 119).

46. 46 – Ibid., 116.

47. 47 – Naves, New York Observer, 28.

48. 48 – Ibid.

49. 49 – Bann, The True Vine, 18.

50. 50 – Ibid.

51. 51 – Weaver discusses Fenton’s ‘somewhat Anglicized amorini’ as a figure dedicated either to ‘Saint Michael or Saint George’. See Weaver, ‘Roger Fenton: Landscape and Still Life’, 118.

52. 52 – Patrizia Di Bello, ‘Photography and Sculpture: A Light Touch’, in Art, History and the Senses, ed. Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, Farnham: Ashgate 2010, 20. In the context of the shift from eighteenth-century to nineteenth-century viewing practices in the museum, when visitors were no longer allowed to touch exhibits, Di Bello explains how the loss of ‘intimacy of touch’ was to some extent compensated by the mechanically reproduced ‘photograph or a statuette, as a souvenir available to be bought and held’ (ibid., 31).

53. 53 – Schwarz, Art and Photography, 84.