The best of failed painters: the exhibition of Roger Fenton's photographs that opens at Tate Britain this month reveals to David Platzer the influence of Turner, Ingres and English Romantic poetry

Apollo, Oct, 2005 by David Platzer

Except to those interested in the history of photography, Roger Fenton is remembered, if at all, for his pioneering images of the Crimean War. A remarkable exhibition that brings his work home for a stay at Tate Britain, after visits to several key American museums, should restore his fame to a wider public.

Born to a mill-owning family in 1819, Fenton was called to the bar but preferred art. He studied painting in London and Paris and exhibited several times without success. It would be interesting to see examples of his painting, but none are known to survive. To judge from such titles as The Letter to Mamma:

What Shall We Write?, they were the kind of sentimental mid-nineteenth-century paintings that are largely unappreciated nowadays. The Great Exhibition of 1851, at which British photography showed poorly in comparison to foreign--especially French--work, inspired him to turn to the camera. Visiting Paris in 1851, he met French photographers and visited the Societe Heliographique, a model for the Photographic Society that he helped to establish at home. He wanted to elevate photography into a medium that would be regarded as equal to painting.

It is easy to see Fenton as a failed painter seeking success in an easier, lower form of art. Yet his photography undoubtedly owes much to his painter's eye. Anyone inclined to repeat the tired saw about photography only being a matter of getting a picture in focus and clicking the button should look at Fenton's work, or any master photographer's, in comparison with some casual amateur's. As so often in innovative artistic careers, timing was essential. In the early 1850s, the photographic medium was new, open, and free from commercialisation.

Impossible as it is to judge Fenton's lost paintings--perhaps they had qualities contemporary critics missed--it seems likely that, freed from then-fashionable Tennysonian subject matter, he was able to focus his painter's eye more precisely through a camera lens. He was the first photographer really to capture the play of light in interior settings. The most brilliant instances of this are Boys in the Refectory, Stonyhurst (1859, Stonyhurst College), with its subtle use of light and shade, and Gallery of Antiquities, The British Museum (c. 1857, Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford).

The Victorians were still very much under the Romantic sway. Fenton was most likely nurtured on the great poets of the early nineteenth century--the exhibition takes its title, 'All the Mighty World', from Wordsworth's 'Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey'--and his luscious views of natural settings show the influence of Turner and Constable, especially in the use of light. The 1854 Wharfe and Pool, Below the Strid (Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gilman Collection), showing two top-hatted men casting their rods in the water, has a Turneresque backdrop of dazzling light. More subdued, yet no less poetic is Harewood House, Yorkshire (1859, the Earl and Countess of Harewoood, and the Trustees of Harewood House Trust), showing the view from the house across the terrace to an expanse of trees: Fenton shows the elements of sky, land, air and water blending into one, as Turner had.

The same was true when he photographed architecture. The exhibition includes examples of his scenes of ruins, notably the abbeys of Fountains, Rievaulx (Fig. 1), Tintern and Glastonbury, against landscape. The ruins, although man-made in both construction and destruction, are one with their environment. Fenton also photographed great cathedrals and country houses that were still very much whole and living organisms. He seems to underline this point when he shows two men chatting at a Lichfield Cathedral door (Lichfield Cathedral, Central Doorway, West Porch, 1858, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) or washing hanging out to dry outside Hardwick Hall (Hardwick Hall, from the South East, 1858, H.H. Richardson Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Design School). The only sign of the industrialism that was such a feature of the period is in Slate Pier at Trefriw (1857, Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford) and the machinery is unobtrusive, almost as picturesque as the setting. Perhaps Fenton wished to record only what was beautiful, perhaps to make a record of what might be lost in the future as progress continued.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Prince Consort became a patron of the Photographic Society, which added 'Royal' to its name. He also invited Fenton and his camera to Windsor and Balmoral. Although Fenton only occasionally ventured into portraiture, he shows remarkable insight into character. Photography took a long time in those days, and sitters could wear down under the strain, causing them to reveal more of themselves than perhaps they wished. Fenton's photographs of the royal family reveal an ability to capture his subjects' humanity while leaving intact their dignity (Fig. 2). Not shown, but illustrated in the catalogue, is an extraordinary picture, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, June 30, 1854 (Royal Collection). Fenton caught the essential loneliness of royalty in the Queen, together with the Prince Consort's tender solicitude--it was the time of the Crimean War. In its way, it is as moving an image of marital love as Rembrandt's Jewish Bride and all one needs to understand the Queen's devastation at her consort's early death.