When it came to landscapes, the photographs reflected the picturesque tastes of the age in fine art and the growing antiquarian interest in documenting and appreciating the past, including ancient buildings and monuments and a countryside untainted by the intrusion of modernity. Benjamin Brecknell Turner’s carefully framed large-format images embodied the approach, with Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap, and Worcestershire (1852–54), being an outstanding example.
Turner’s photos are notably English in the intimacy of their settings. Unlike the sublime photographs of untraversed open spaces and enormous geological features produced by the great American landscape photographers such as Carleton E. Watkins and William Henry Jackson a decade or so later, Hedgerow Trees offers no elevated viewpoint and lacks a backdrop. This is the everyday countryside—cosy and familiar.
Tellingly, when Turner contributed another of his images for inclusion in The Photographic Album for the Year 1855, assembled by the Photographic Exchange Club, he chose to support it with a few lines from The Sketch Book by Geoffrey Crayon (pseudonym of the American writer Washington Irving): ‘England does not abound in grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural repose and sheltered quiet. Every antique farmhouse and the moss-grown cottage is a picture.’
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Denne historien er fra June 29, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
