1 Rachel Worth Professor of History of Fashion the Arts Institute At

Rachel Worth Professor of History of Fashion The Arts Institute at Bournemouth England Tel 44-768 923659

Paper for Conference on the Historical Use of Images, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and FARO – Vlaams Steupunt voor Cultureel Erfgoed, 10 March 2009

Representations of English Rural Working-Class Dress and the Photography of Henry Peach Robinson

‘Behind every image, something has disappeared’ (Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?)

I. Introduction

In the 1880s, the photograph was still a relatively new artistic medium, with distinctive methods and conventions that distinguished it from painting. But in other respects there were similarities between these two mediums. Apart from rare ‘snapshots’, such as those taken by artist George Clausen (1852-1944) and used as preliminary studies for his paintings (figs. 1 and 2), photographs were, at the very least, posed, and in the case of the work of Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), staged, in a complex process in which country models and clothes were deliberately selected and used to convey a rural vision. These images of rural life were not dissimilar in feeling to some of the idealised rural scenes found in the paintings of Helen Allingham (1848-1926) (figs. 3 and 4). From a twenty-first century perspective, there is much about the photograph of the 1880s that makes it appear as much a ‘work of art’ as a painting. In fact, the relationship between the painting and the photograph in the late nineteenth century was complexly reciprocal: while the photograph was considered by a number of photographers to constitute a work of art, conversely painters were interested in the visual effects produced by photography. Influenced by the work of French artist Jules Bastien Lepage (1848-1884) (fig. 5), British artists Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929) (fig. 6) and George Clausen both used photographic effects in their work. ‘One feels’, pointed out W. C. Brownell in The Magazine of Art in 1883, ‘the painter (Bastien Lepage) himself as if he were a camera’. He went on to ask whether ‘the art of painting’ was ‘to become...essentially scientific, and busy itself with collecting facts as the only worthwhile occupation?’1 Brownell’s words offer comment not only on the way in which paintings were influenced by photographic techniques, but also provide an insight into the contemporary

1 perception of photography as an ‘essentially scientific’ craft, with the express aim of collecting ‘facts’.

This perception led not only to a particular view about the factual or realist nature of those paintings that employed photographic techniques, but also about the supposedly objective nature of what is represented by the photograph. As John Taylor points out in his study A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination, for writers on photography there seems to have been a shared assumption which was ‘their belief in the authority of what they (photographers) ‘took’ in photographs to be hard evidence or truth. They assumed this authority to be derived from the way photographs had a closer, one-to- one relationship to reality than any other system of representation’.2 In fact, I would endorse the observation made by John Tagg, that ‘every photograph is the result of specific, and, in every sense, significant distortions, which render its relation to any prior reality deeply problematic’.3 This paper illustrates the complex relationship between the photographic image and that which Tagg refers to as ‘prior reality’.

Aesthetic and philosophical issues about whether the photograph of the second half of the nineteenth century should be considered to be an art-form or a snapshot of ‘reality’ (or both) have been much debated. But less frequently discussed in this context is the detail of the clothing worn by sitters in so-called British art photography of the period. Commentators such as Phyllis Rose discussing the work of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), for example, in particular her portraits of women, have argued that the latter ‘look less beautiful the more the details of their dress are articulated…’ and that ‘Cameron was right to make her models take their hair down and wrap themselves in shawls and turbans. It eternalizes their beauty…’.4 Rose later comments that ‘clothing, occupation, class, personality – all these things are transitory and accidental, they did not interest Cameron. She refused to be influenced by mere circumstance…’.5 Rose’s observations raise interesting questions about the importance - or otherwise - to the late nineteenth-century photographer of what his/her sitters wore: in what ways and why did a photographer dictate what was worn? Of what significance are the items of clothing selected and what light do they cast on the intentions of the photographer in question, on possible interpretations of the work itself and on the way historians later utilise the photographic image as ‘evidence’?

This paper examines the representation of clothing in the photography of Henry Peach Robinson, paying particular attention to such well-known composite images as Bringing Home the May (1862) (fig 6) and selected later works in the light of Robinson’s own philosophical perspectives as articulated in his writings Picture Making by Photography (1884) and The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph (1896). It is also interesting to draw comparisons with other photographers working in the 1880s such as Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) who chose comparable subject matter – working-class people of humble

2 economic means resident in the English countryside. While there is a tendency to use visual images as ‘illustration’ for the elucidation of historical knowledge, my approach as an historian of dress / social historian reveals something of the complexity of issues surrounding the interpretation of such images. Alongside knowledge of the clothing itself, I argue that it is the context in which such clothes are represented that furthers an understanding of the important role played by dress in the articulation of a society in transition. This is a society that was changing from an essentially rural, to an urban, culture in late nineteenth-century Britain. The discussion concludes by exploring the significance of dress for the development of the particular rural idyll that characterised English culture from the late nineteenth century. It is therefore with the role the photograph had in the late nineteenth century in representing rural working-class clothing in the context of a nostalgic longing for stability with which this paper is particularly concerned.

II. The Development of the Photograph as a Work of Art and Early Representations of the Landscape and Rural Life Modern, twentieth- and twenty-first century assumptions about the immediacy of photography have influenced our views about the supposed objectivity of the photograph in the nineteenth century. However, even a cursory discussion of the history of photography reveals that the complexity of photographic processes in the early years of development militated against the production of ‘spontaneous’ images. Furthermore, in terms of the treatment of its subject- matter, photography took as its model many of the conventions of painting as the following discussion illustrates.

William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800-1877) invention of the calotype process - sometimes called ‘Talbotype’ - in 1840 (patented in 1841) involved the production of negatives of fine-quality writing paper: each sheet had to be prepared by hand, first brushed with a solution of salt and later sensitised in a bath of silver nitrate. Far from the instantaneity we are now accustomed to, exposures made via this process would have lasted a half-hour even on the brightest days, and each positive from the finished negative took nearly as long to print in the sun.6 In this process, the image is part of the paper and its fibres, rather than appearing on a coated surface. (The albumen print - the first glossy, coated photographic print, in which thin paper was first coated with a mixture of whisked egg white and salt, then sensitised with silver nitrate - was not in general use until about 1855 but continued from then on to be used until 1890.) Although amateurs could buy a Talbotype licence for one or two pounds, for photographic professionals the licences could cost anything from £10 to £100 or more and the patents thus stifled widespread use and experimentation.7

In France and America, meanwhile, the daguerreotype - named after its French inventor Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) - was more favoured than in England. It gave a highly detailed image formed on a sheet of copper, thinly plated with silver and then rendered light-sensitive

3 by a chemical reaction with iodine and bromide vapours. The use of the calotype by photographers such as Benjamin Brecknell Turner (discussed below) rather than the daguerreotype thus reflects a particular aesthetic choice, the former producing ‘fuzzier, artier’ prints while the latter ‘seemed to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.8 Although subject to a number of modifications and improvements, the calotype process had only limited possibilities for reproduction and distribution and was not suited to commercial and popular production.9

Exposure times were radically cut and a high resolution of detail achieved when in 1851 Frederick Scott Archer (1813-1857) introduced a process in which a sheet of glass was coated with a thin film of collodion containing potassium iodide and sensitised on location with silver nitrate (known as the wet collodion process). The plate had to be exposed while still wet and developed immediately. Archer’s process of wet-collodion-on-glass negatives successfully combined the precision of the daguerreotype and the reproducibility of the Talbotype. It allowed exposures that could be counted in seconds rather than minutes and produced sharp and luminous prints. Although debate over the relative merits of paper and glass was lively in the early 1850s, the future lay with the wet-collodion process which rapidly displaced paper, and dominated the medium for three decades.10

In the early years of photography, photographers who chose to represent landscape drew upon the artistic conventions adopted by the genre of agricultural landscape. British amateur photographer Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894), for example, travelled widely in the early 1850s, from his native London to Lynmouth (Devon) in the west and Whitby (Yorkshire) in the north, making highly accomplished images of country scenes - farm-buildings and farmyards, trees and streams and ruined abbeys - of which sixty that he considered his best were included in his album Photographic Views from Nature (c. 1854-5) (now in the Victoria & Albert Museum London). From the first Turner was a devotee of the methods of Fox Talbot and the production of the ‘calotype’ or ‘Talbotype’: he owned a copy of Talbot’s pioneering publication The Pencil of Nature (1844-6). Like many of his upper middle-class contemporaries, points out his biographer Martin Barnes, Turner was undoubtedly familiar with the established topographical and picturesque tradition in the visual arts and the early amateur photographers ‘found affinities with their artist forebears such as Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), Cornelius Varley (1781-1873) and, of course, John Constable (1776-1837)’.11 In particular, the work of Turner may be compared with that of Robert Hills (1769-1844), both of whom concentrated on depicting humble farm scenes.12 The persistent use by Turner of the paper-based calotype - which suppressed detail in favour of a limited tonal range - could be likened to the effects produced by the use of watercolours favoured by Hills (one of the co- founders of the Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1804) and other watercolourists such as John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) and Peter de Wint (1784-1849).13 The resemblance between the effects produced by watercolour paint and the calotype has also been observed

4 by Sara Stevenson in Hill and Adamson’s The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth.14 In his choice of subject-matter, B. B. Turner was by no means unique as a photographer: his British contemporaries such as Roger Fenton (1819-1869), Frances Bedford (1816-1894), and Hugh Welch Diamond (1809-1886), to name just a few, dealt with much the same imagery, although Turner was consistently praised as being one of the best practitioners of the Talbotype.15

Obsessed by images of the rural, Turner’s view of the countryside was, however, overwhelmingly nostalgic: in his photos of Bredicot village in Worcestershire, for example, he chose not to acknowledge signs of modernity such as the impact of the railway from Gloucester to Birmingham, which, between 1839 and 1840, cut Bredicot village in half. Shunning the contemporary world, the countryside was for Turner - as for many middle- and upper-class Victorians - ‘a place to go shooting, to relax and to photograph the signs of a reassuring older order’.16 Significantly, Turner rarely chose to include working figures in his photographs. Even allowing for technical difficulties, Turner’s choice primarily to show scenes without people is certainly a conscious decision.17 For many Victorian artists working in the 1840s and 1850s, showing the conditions of farm labourers would not have been considered appropriate18 and, observes Barnes, ‘excluding figures in their contemporary clothes makes the period less historically specific and allows, simultaneously, the possibility of nostalgic projection and a timeless quality’.19 Conversely, for other Victorian photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson, the choice of the clothing worn by the figures in the photographs served as a means of portraying precisely that nostalgia and ‘timeless quality’ which Turner, by avoiding both people and their clothing, wished to represent.

The expense of having one’s photograph taken limited for many decades the number of working-class people who instigated a photographic image of themselves. References to the commercial sale of calotypes in the 1840s make it evident that they were expensive. A special portrait session cost the sitter a guinea, while individual prints were 7 shillings 6d, or, if they were produced in quantity as part of the studio’s commercial stock, 5 shillings.20 Even when, in the 1870s, Henry Peach Robinson and Nelson King Cherrill were running their photography business in Tunbridge Wells, and were forced to lower their prices, cartes-de- visite cost 10 shillings 6d. per dozen21 which would have represented not far off a week’s wage for the majority of agricultural labourers and would therefore have been far beyond their means. Thus on the whole, photography was something in which they would have posed for the benefit of the photographer and those who then consumed these images; it was something done to them rather than something they initiated themselves, and they had little say in how they were represented.

5 While, on the one hand, B. B. Turner eschewed images in which people figured, the well- known partnership (albeit short-lived, due to the premature death of Adamson in 1848) between the chemist Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and the artist David Octavius Hill (1802- 1870) resulted in some of the earliest and most fascinating photographic images of working- class men and women - the fishermen and women of the village of Newhaven on the Firth of Forth, Scotland, executed in the early 1840s. Their work is a rare exemplar of the way in which the calotype has preserved images of a working-class community, whose women were famous for their beauty and, significantly, their picturesque dress. As Sara Stevenson has pointed out, Hill and Adamson’s work was viewed by a wide audience and their potential influence was considerable.22 The village of Newhaven became a natural tourist attraction for summer visitors to Edinburgh who appreciated the therapeutic effects of dipping into the chilly waters of the North Sea. Hill and Adamson, while interested in the ‘heroism, the social morality and the distinctive culture of the village’,23 were also seduced by the unusual dress of the fishwives.

The picturesque appellation attached to the Newhaven fishwives’ dress came from the fact that it was based on late eighteenth-century working dress - a short gown, a bodice which came below the waist and short, striped petticoats and skirts, which were usually kilted up to keep the outer surface clean as well as to show off the interesting effect produced by the pattern of the striped skirts. The community’s independence from the changing fashionable shape as well as practical considerations kept these elements of the costume fixed in time, and, apart from one or two concessions to ‘modern’ practices - for example, by the 1830s the fishwives normally wore shoes and stockings where they would have gone barefoot before - dress in the village remained relatively immune from modern developments in fashion.24 Their traditional dress ensured that the fishwives came to represent in the tourist imagination some stability in an otherwise changing world: as Stevenson points out, whereas ‘a sitter in fashionable clothes was fixed to a historical date, the fishwives’ distinctive costume took them out of the exact sense of time inherent in more fashionable dress’.25 On the other hand, Hill’s interest was not exclusively in the picturesque: a notable example of this is his depiction of the top-hats worn by the fishermen. The stove-pipe hat was fashionable and was considered to be ‘a mysterious combination of the inconvenient and the unpicturesque’.26 Hill and Adamson’s treatment of hats provides evidence that their admiration for Newhaven was for its contemporary reality: as Stevenson observes, Hill was ‘not presenting the village as a pastoral ideal divorced from real life...he was happy to incorporate such artificiality (as represented by the hats), or rather modernity and to treat the facts of his own time as part of an ideal’27. Significantly, the pair took their photographic equipment down to Newhaven and may have set up a working studio there whereas later photographers who chose the fishwives as subject matter invited them into their existing studios, providing them with elaborately painted backdrops of Newhaven or the city streets.28

III. Photography, Rural Dress, and the ‘Myth’ of Rural Life The work of Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) provides a contrast to that of earlier photographs with a rural theme such as the work of Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894) and of working-class life, such as Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and the artist David Octavius’ Hill’s (1802-1870) celebrated images of Newhaven fishermen and fishwives. Robinson’s biographer Margaret Harker has described Robinson as ‘the most celebrated photographer in Britain during his lifetime’ who ‘dominated the world of art photography for a period of over thirty years’.29

Born in the historic Shropshire town of Ludlow, Robinson was apprenticed at the age of 14 to a printer, stationer and bookseller for five years before practising photography from his twenties. For a long time, he had had ambitions to be an artist, spending much of the time after his apprenticeship was completed drawing and painting (as well as during what leisure hours he had in his first job as a bookseller’s assistant in Bromsgrove, Birmingham), although he never managed to persuade his parents that he could make a satisfactory livelihood as an artist. However, Robinson’s interest in and approach to photography need to be seen in the light of his underlying preoccupation with painting. Many of his greatest friends were painters and he became connected to some through the matches made by his children: his elder son, Ralph, for example, married Janet Spence Reid, daughter of John Robertson Reid, the Scottish painter of genre, landscape and coastal scenes. For Robinson, the photograph was essentially a work of art, through which he could convey his ideas about the picturesque. In this context, it is significant that he was an admirer of the work of Myles Birket Foster (1825- 1899), whose paintings and illustrations assisted in perpetuating the myth of an idyllic rural England well into the twentieth century. In his book, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph (1896), Robinson maintained that ‘Mr Foster’s drawings have been especially worthy of the study of the photographer, his genre and landscape subjects being of the kind very possible in photography...’.30

It was while working in Leamington in the early 1850s that Henry Robinson first became interested in photography, subscribing to the Journal of the Photographic Society from its commencement in 1853 and successfully practising the calotype process. The friendship and encouragement received from the photographer Hugh Welch Diamond helped persuade Robinson to devote his career to photography and he ran a professional photographic studio first in Leamington Spa from 1857 (until 1864) and subsequently (after a period of illness) in Tunbridge Wells from 1868. Robinson’s work - of which the vast majority of pictures for exhibition were rural in theme - is of particular interest in the context of this discussion of rural dress. Robinson espoused a theory of photography based on the aesthetics of the picturesque movement in the arts,31 devoting much of his major literary work, Pictorial Effect

7 in Photography (1868/9) to an account of how the real and the ideal could be associated in one photograph and the importance of the picturesque:

‘It is an old canon of art, that every scene worth painting must have something of the sublime, the beautiful or the picturesque. By its nature, photography can make no pretensions to represent the first, but beauty can be represented by its means and picturesqueness has never had so perfect an interpreter’.32

One of Robinson’s best-known photographs, Bringing Home the May (1862), (fig. 7) demonstrates how Robinson attempted to combine the real with the ideal / the picturesque. On one level, the photograph expresses the real: ‘truthfulness’ was indeed Robinson’s intention, although his definition of truth was not a literal one: ‘I am far from saying’, he wrote in Pictorial Effect in Photography, ‘that a photograph must be an actual, literal, and absolute fact; that would deny all I have written; but it must represent truth...That truth in art may exist without an absolute observance of facts...’.33 In Bringing Home the May, this approximation to truth is portrayed via the representation of a real country tradition (in which, in his youth, Robinson had frequently participated) when the may blossom was gathered and huge branches taken home on May Day. Like many of Robinson’s photographs, Bringing Home the May is a composite photograph - that is, it is made up of a number of individual negatives (nine in the case of Bringing Home the May) printed one by one, and mounted together to form one unified picture. Robinson justified the use of the composite photograph by maintaining that he could ‘get nearer the truth for certain subjects with several negatives than with one’.34 The composition is artificially contrived therefore, although the intended finished effect is ‘real’. ‘It is not the fact of reality that is required, but the truth of imitation that constitutes a veracious picture’, Robinson stated.35 Bringing Home the May met with a rapturous reception from the photographic press.36 The clothing chosen by Robinson for this image - in particular the repeated use of the sun-bonnet (fig. 8) - is noteworthy.

From an early age Robinson took a keen interest in dress and historical costume and between 1849 and 1851 he had produced the designs from which his mother - who was an excellent dressmaker - made up garments to be worn at the large number of costume balls given in Ludlow in the winter months. Robinson’s use of real items of rural dress in Bringing Home the May and in other photographs - the sun-bonnet in particular - to express the picturesque and a rural ideal is significant and a practice to which he returned in the majority of his photographs of rural life. The individual elements of the costume in his photographs were authentic. Robinson’s view of the importance of ‘accuracy’ in this respect is illustrated by his own critique of one of his earliest photos - Mr Werner as Richelieu (1857) - which he regarded as ‘desperately bad’, not because of the photographic qualities but because the costume was not authentic.37

8 The method Robinson used to acquire the clothing which features in his photos and the fact that Robinson then dressed up his models for the compositions (for the sake of ‘authenticity’) are both significant and render his work particularly interesting in the context of this discussion. In his book, Picture Making by Photography (1884), Robinson described how he acquired the clothing featured in his photographs:

‘It is not always easy to explain what you really mean when you meet a girl in a lonely country lane, and you offer to buy her clothes, but a little perseverance and a good offer usually succeed. A country girl’s dress is not often worth more than eighteenpence, and if you turn the pence into shillings, and look businesslike all the time, you may make pretty sure of walking off with the property, or, at all events, getting it sent to you next day’.38

‘My models’, wrote Robinson ‘may be called to some extent artificial but they are so near the real thing (when dressed in country clothes) as to be taken for it by the real natives.’39 Robinson urged photographers to acquire a wide range of accessories, as well as dresses, cloaks and aprons. However, judging by the number of different kinds of sun-bonnets that feature in so many of the photographs taken by Robinson in the period from the early 1860s (for example, Bringing Home the May) to just before his death (for example, The Starling’s Nest (1900), (fig. 9)), of all the garments he possessed, sun-bonnets seem to have constituted the largest category of clothing he collected. Significantly, Robinson believed that ‘it is the sun-bonnet which is characteristic of the country’.40

In his efforts to create authenticity in his photographs, he stressed that the clothes worn by his models should not be new: ‘In my practice’, he said, ‘I always used old clothes’.41 In The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph (1896), he complained of the incompetence of those photographers who mismanaged dressed-up models:

‘For instance, we usually find that when a young lady is dressed as a peasant model, she generally looks like one of the chorus in an opera. The clothes are new and very clean, the country clodhopping boots are perhaps represented by patent leather shoes and by some strange dispensation of artistic providence, she is only allowed to appear as a milkmaid or a gleaner’.42

Robinson thus seems to have been well aware of the rustic stereotype manifested in traditional representations of milkmaids and gleaners. However, in trying to obviate the conventions of one particular genre and attempting authenticity in which he combined real clothes with artificial constructions, Robinson was, ironically, contributing to the development of yet another kind of rural idyll, and to this extent Robinson’s work can be seen in the same tradition as artists such as Helen Allingham and Myles Birket Foster referred to above.43 Just as Allingham went on depicting sun-bonnets in her paintings while they were, in fact,

9 becoming an anachronism, Robinson uses the sun-bonnet in a similar manner, thus utilising particular clothing in a way which symbolises a disappearing rural world and articulates a nostalgic longing for the past.

Although it appears with less frequency than the sun-bonnet, Robinson also uses the smock- frock in an interesting way in his photographs (fig. 10). An elderly man wearing a smock-frock appears both in When the Day’s Work is Done (first exhibited in the Photographic Society’s Exhibition in 1877) and Dawn and Sunset (1885), (fig.11), which photos are considered two of Robinson’s most successful composite photographs. Both show simple, homely and comfortable - if idealised - cottage home interiors.44 When the Day’s Work is Done shows an old labourer in his smock-frock earnestly reading (we are probably to assume that the large tome in front of him is the bible), while his wife contentedly mends stockings, thus conforming to the ideal role of the working-class woman in the Victorian period. Dawn and Sunset, meanwhile, contrasts a woman with her baby, at the ‘dawn’ of life, with the elderly labourer in his smock-frock at the ‘sunset’ of life. In both photographs, the association of old age and tradition with the smock-frock and, in their turn, the latter’s association with an idealised rural existence suggests a symbolism attached to the smock-frock which goes beyond superficial appearances.

‘Robinson’, says Harker, ‘like many photographers and painters, tended to idealise the cottage way-of-life rather than reveal the harsh reality as portrayed by the writer Thomas Hardy during the same period’.45 Robinson uses particular garments - which he has himself selected - to convey ideas about an idealised rural existence. In the case of the smock-frock, it is not so much that it is represented out of its correct context (by the 1880s the smock-frock would have been mostly confined to the shoulders of old men, as it appears in the photograph Dawn and Sunset), rather that it is associated with ‘ideal’ aspects of rural life (hand-work, craft and an age before the onset of agricultural mechanisation). In the case of the sun- bonnet, Robinson believed that this was the garment which was quintessentially associated with the countryside, and thus he proceeded to dress up his young models in these garments right through to the end of his working life - as in A Starling’s Nest (1900) - even when sun- bonnets were mostly confined to being worn by older women. Robinson, I suggest, attached a symbolic significance to his representations of rural working-class dress which was then conveyed to his audiences and which helped to create and perpetuate a rural idyll in which clothing plays an important part.

III Dress and the ‘Counter-Myth’ in Photographs of Rural England The particular value of a discussion of the work of Henry Peach Robinson is that, alongside the existence of the photographs themselves, we are given an in-depth critique of his approach to the medium and what might be described as his ‘philosophy’ of photography. This helps greatly in the quest to go at least some way in ascertaining, in Martin Kemp’s

10 words, the message that the ‘originator’ of the work of art was ‘aiming to communicate’.46 While Robinson may, as Harker asserts, have dominated the world of art photography in the late nineteenth century, there were other highly influential photographers whose expressed ‘philosophies’ were diametrically opposed to those of Robinson and whose work appears to provide an antidote to an approach which sees the photograph as the appropriate medium to convey ideas about the picturesque and the idealistic aspects of rural life. Just as Robinson’s work indirectly takes up themes and issues explored by artists such as Helen Allingham and Myles Birket Foster (associated with the idealistic ‘cottage door school’ of painting), the photography of Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) aligns itself in its approach to the exponents of a ‘counter-myth’ school which challenges the idealisation of rural life and looks, ostensibly, for a more realistic portrayal of its realities as put forward by painters Henry Herbert La Thangue and George Clausen, with whom Emerson maintained close friendships.

In some important respects, Emerson’s record of Norfolk rural life can be paralleled with that of La Thangue, whose Return of the Reapers (fig. 6) with its evident debt to the techniques of photography. Emerson’s scientific training as a doctor, coupled with his interest in the arts (he particularly admired the work of J. F. Millet and the British Naturalist painters)47 led him to the realisation that photography was the medium where the merging of art and science took on the greatest significance.48 Unlike Robinson’s definition of truth - a combination of the real and the ideal (and therefore the possibility of the incorporation of the artificial) - Emerson believed in the importance of photography’s role in conveying truth to nature as a principle and condemned Robinson’s elaborate photographic constructions and his theories as put forward in Pictorial Effect in Photography. One of Emerson’s main arguments for naturalistic photography was that of differential focusing whereby parts of the image are sharply focussed and the rest are less sharp (because the human eye sees a part only of the subject it is viewing in sharp focus while the rest of it is softened).49 In his book Naturalistic Photography (1889), Emerson thus denounced the unnatural ‘sharpness’ which, he implied, characterised the photographs of Robinson, for example.50

The visual representation of Emerson’s theories is to be seen in his photographs of the Norfolk landscape, peopled by labourers who are not ‘dressed up’ in the way Robinson’s models are. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886) provides a fascinating visual record of different aspects of rural life. Emerson and the little-known artist Thomas Frederick Goodall (1857-1944) (an old school friend of La Thangue), produced the photographs (fig. 12) for the work which are accompanied by a detailed literary account of what was happening in each picture, the combination of image and words providing the reader with ‘a complete Naturalistic experience’.51 Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads was followed by Idylls of the Norfolk Broads (1886), Pictures from Life in Field and Fen (1888), Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888), Wild Life on a Tidal Water (1890), On English Lagoons (1893) and Marsh Leaves (1895).

As with the paintings and photographs of George Clausen, there are few smock-frocks and sun-bonnets to be seen in the photographs of Emerson and this, combined with the fact that he did not believe in the ‘dressing up’ or artificial constructions which are the hallmarks of Robinson’s work, amounts to a more straightforwardly ‘realistic’ representation of the Norfolk rural working classes. Unlike the ‘snapshot’ approach adopted by Clausen, however, Emerson often spent several days finding a landscape, suggesting, argues John Taylor ‘not only an educated eye but the considerable time and money that such sophistication requires’.52 Rather than using middle or upper class models for his photographs, Emerson actively sought the company of the locals who figure in his work, but he also believed in a traditional rural hierarchy in which landlords, farmers and landless labourers all have their natural place in the social order of things. He held the tourist in contempt and was opposed to the influx of the lower-middle classes into the countryside, setting himself up as a ‘guardian of the old order’. His underlying motive, argues Taylor, was to ‘preserve’ the land ‘in pictures and texts for the future’.53

In this respect, the views of Emerson on the clothing suitable for villagers who were to appear in his photographs are particularly interesting. For example, in an article he wrote for Amateur Photographer in 1886, he described how he persuaded a man and woman into more appropriate clothing: from the village shop, ‘the man came out in a hideous new hat, and the girl also was got up in the villagers’ latest fashion. It was only after much talking and begging that they were persuaded to change and equip themselves in less pretentious manner, and then they were etched in silver, for better, for worse’.54 Thus, while Emerson did not actually ‘dress up’ the subjects which appear in his work, he exerted a strong influence and personal preference in their ‘choice’ of clothing, once again showing the importance of clothing in contemporaries’ perceptions of the ideal / rural. Emerson in his writing often expressed a perceived contrast between the corrupting town and the pure countryside. These different values were frequently articulated in terms of the clothing pertaining to each, respectively. In On English Lagoons (1893), Emerson tells the story of two children, relating the sickness or health of their spirits in terms of their bodies and their clothes: the ‘country-bred child...turned her dear, strong eyes curiously upon us for a moment only...her dress swinging loosely and gracefully from her swelling hips...’, whereas by contrast, the ‘town-bred girl’ was ‘clad in a bright red dress, all puffed and puckered, fantastically distorted to hide her ill-developed little body’.55 As Taylor observes:

When ‘natives’ began to look like townspeople, taking on the materialist values of the despised, urban classes, he (Emerson) was evidently shocked. By abandoning the appearance of authentic country peasants for modern dress, they had broken out of the distant time, untouched by history, where he had been used to placing them. Fashion could not exist in a society of caste and rank. When the ‘natives’ dressed in fashion, then the once

12 clear signs of class (and class itself) had become confused. He begged them to dress in their everyday clothes, and not to change. When he fixed the peasants in time, he could demonstrate that the old values that supported both him and his work could still exist.56

Thus Emerson’s images - for all that he said about the importance of using the photograph as a medium for capturing ‘truth to nature’ - are not as objective as at first appears. Neither was he without an agenda, and it could be argued that his preoccupations were, ultimately, not that dissimilar to those of Robinson’s. In fact, even those county record or survey photographers of the late nineteenth century who, at first inspection, appear to be using the medium of photography to record in a scientific way country landscapes and buildings for the benefit of posterity, were, in fact, ‘concerned about ways of life which were vanishing: from their positions in the middle class, they regretted the disappearance of what they considered to be the quaint, unspoilt lifestyles of different and lower-class people’.57 In spite of the stated objective of making a total and unbiased record illustrating the archaeology, architecture, landscape and scenery, ethnology, botany, geology and town life of the county, a cursory look at those diary accounts left by the photographers for the Warwickshire Photographic Survey (which began in 1890), ‘allow us to see’ says Taylor, ‘that the duty to survey according to the ideal ‘scientific’ approach of record work was unrealisable’...and that ‘the diaries, especially, betray the impurity of the scheme, the fact that it was always tied to the surveyors’ own ideological perspectives of what was ‘quaint’ or ‘historical’. ‘We see’, Taylor concludes, ‘that the claim to objectivity was only ever a part of the rhetoric of discovery’.58 Taylor’s words provide a fitting conclusion to this discussion, for which the overriding theme has been the way in which ‘the picturesque was still being used to reassure people that England was as beautiful as ever’.59 Those photographers who, like Robinson, ‘engaged in subterfuge in order to achieve this end, substituting the children of the gentry for poor children in bucolic scenes because the poor never looked the part’,60 dressing up their models, albeit in the genuine articles of rural dress, as well as those who, like Peter Henry Emerson, purported to be more ‘objective’ but nevertheless in subtle ways influenced the representation of the Norfolk ‘peasants’ and how they were dressed for his photographs, provide an interesting commentary on the importance of clothing in the representation of their respective versions of a rural idyll. Rather than suggest that one version is more ‘genuine’ than another, both Robinson and Emerson provide - through their photographs and the accompanying commentaries - some fascinating insights into the motivations behind their work. Though in other respects diametrically opposed, both wished to preserve and record for posterity a vision of rural England which was immune to change and in which clothing became an important vehicle for the portrayal of that vision.

6,410 words

13 Notes 1. W. C Brownell, “Bastien-Lepage: Painter and Psychologist”, The Magazine of Art (Vol. 6, 1883), p. 271. 2. John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 39. 3. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographs and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 2. 4. Phyllis Rose, “Milkmaid Madonnas: An Appreciation of Cameron’s Portraits of Women” in Sylvia Wolf, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, published in conjunction with the exhibition “Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women” organised by The Art Institute of Chicago), p. 14. 5. Ibid., p. 15. 6. Malcolm Daniel, “The State of the Art” in Martin Barnes (ed.), Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England through a Victorian Lens (London: V&A Publications, 2001), p. 8. 7. Ibid., p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 13. 9. Michael Frizot, “The Truthfulness of the Calotype” in Michael Frizot, (ed.), A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), p. 70. 10. Malcolm Daniel, op. cit., p. 10. 11. Martin Barnes, “Photographic Views from Nature” in Martin Barnes (ed.), op. cit., p. 38. 12. Idem. 13. Idem. 14. Sara Stevenson, Hill and Adamson’s The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991), p. 43. 15. Martin Barnes, op. cit., p. 41. 16. Ibid., p. 45. 17. Ibid., p. 47. 18. Ibid., p. 42. 19. Ibid., p. 47. 20. Sara Stevenson, op. cit., p. 45. 21. Margaret Harker, Henry Peach Robinson, Master of Photographic Art, 1830-1901 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 58. 22. Sara Stevenson, op. cit., p. 45. 23. Sara Stevenson, op. cit., p. 25. Stevenson describes the ‘seed and inspiration’ for the Newhaven calotypes as lying in ‘the three key works of Scotland’s greatest and most influential artists’: Robert Burns’ poem ‘The Jolly Beggars’, David Wilkie’s painting Distraining for Rent and Walter Scott’s novel, The Antiquary (see especially pp. 33-36). 24. Sara Stevenson, op. cit., p. 19. 25. Ibid., p. 40.

14 26. Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, “The Art of Dress”, in Music and the Art of Dress (essays reprinted from the Quarterly Review), 1852. 27. Sara Stevenson, op. cit., p. 41. 28. Ibid., pp. 29-30. 29. Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 84. 30. H. P. Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, (Percy Lund & Company of Bradford and London, 1896), pp. 139-147. 31. Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 44. Harker uses the term picturesque in a specific sense and as it relates to the vogue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of what Hugh Honour describes as the ‘artfully informal landscape park with its sweeping Claudean vistas’, (Hugh Honour, Romanticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 110), which went against the aesthetics of writers such as Wordsworth and artists such as Constable. Robinson’s own reference to the term in the quotation which follows shows an awareness of the term in precisely this context, which distinguishes the ‘picturesque’ from the artistic categories of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’. The picturesque was neither awe-inspiring (like the sublime) nor serene (like the beautiful) but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures - medieval ruins were, for example, quintessentially picturesque. From this more specific definition, the term is, from now on, used as a descriptive one for a scene which may be quaint, pretty, and which implies something artificial rather than natural. 32. H. P Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography, Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers, (Piper and Carter, 1869). The text was first published as a series in 1868 in Photographic News and then in 1869 as the first edition of a book with illustrations. 33. Ibid., p. 78. 34. H. P. Robinson, “Composition Not Patchwork”, British Journal of Photography, (2 July 1860, pp. 189-190). 35. H. P. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography, op. cit., p. 109. 36. Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 35. 37. Ibid., p. 25. 38. H. P. Robinson, Picture Making by Photography (Piper and Carter, 1884), p. 54. See also the discussion of this aspect of Robinson’s work in Rachel Worth, “Rural Labouring Dress, 1850-1900: Some Problems of Representation”, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture, (Vol. 3, Issue 3, pp. 323-342), especially pp. 331-334. 39. H. P. Robinson, Picture Making by Photography, op. cit., p. 53. Sara Stevenson comments that ‘Robinson’s was a dressed-up, theatrical reality - real people with the wrong people inside’ (Sara Stevenson, op. cit., p. 31). 40. Maragaret Harker, op. cit., p. 66. 41. H. P. Robinson, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, op. cit., 98. 42. Ibid., p. 95.

15 43. Robinson is known to have greatly admired the work of Myles Birket Foster. Harker compares Foster’s Young Gleaners Resting by a Stile (1886) with Robinson’s Autumn (1863) in terms of picture construction, tonal arrangement, lighting effects and rendition of detail (see Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 39). In Picture Making by Photography, Robinson wrote of the illustrator Myles Birket Foster that his ‘drawings on wood, as illustrations to books, afford grand lessons in the introduction and composition of groups of figures and incidents and light and shade’ (H. P. Robinson, Picture Making by Photography, op. cit., p. 77). 44. In this respect, Dawn and Sunset in particular makes an interesting comparison with Thomas Faed’s painting From Dawn to Sunset (The Full Cycle of Life) (1861), the latter ‘a somewhat more realistic portrayal of a cottager’s home, overcrowded, untidy and drab’ (Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 76). 45. Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 76. See also Christiana Payne’s Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art (exhibition catalogue, published by Djanogly Art Gallery, The University of Nottingham Arts Centre in association with Lund Humphries Publishers, London, 1998). 46. Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 7. 47. Jozef Gross, “The Broadland Paysanniste” in British Journal of Photography, (12 December 1896, issue 50, pp. 1420-1423), p. 1423. 48. Peter Turner and Richard Wood, P. H. Emerson, Photographer of Norfolk (London: Gordon Fraser, 1974), p. 11. 49. Margaret Harker, op. cit., p. 78 and Adrian Jenkins, Painters and Peasants: Henry La Thangue and British Rural Naturalism, 1880-1905 (Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, 2000), p. 86. 50. P. H. Emerson, Naturalistic Photography (Hazell, Watson and Viney Ltd., 1889), pp. 170- 173. 51. Adrian Jenkins, op. cit., p. 89. 52. John Taylor, op. cit., p. 101. 53. Ibid., p. 103. 54. P. H. Emerson, “The Log of the ‘Lucy’”, Amateur Photographer, Supplement to the Winter Number (10 December 1884, pp. 1-4), p. 1. 55. P. H. Emerson, On English Lagoons (London: David Nutt, 1893). 56. John Taylor, op. cit., p. 104. 57. Ibid., p. 51. 58. Ibid., pp. 62-63. 59. Ibid., p. 19. 60. Idem.