The garden adapted itself to whichever style each painter practised. In the Spaniard Joaquin Sorolla’s blithe 1911 portrait of a white-suited Louis Comfort Tiffany painting among heavy blooms, the garden is a well-mannered accessory. Klimt, however, saw flowers as pixels in a heavily worked whole where nature is all pattern and no single motif dominates. This exhibition is full of lovely pictures and it is hard not to see them simply in purely aesthetic terms. Each one though is also a record of how the garden offered not just what Nolde described as “calm and beautiful hours” but a technical challenge that could be, at times, the opposite of repose. Paintings, like gardens, may be a lovesome thing but it takes the hard work of painters and gardeners to make them so.
Beauty was the central concern too of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79). In 1864 she wrote that “My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.” Primarily a portraitist (she took the definitive pictures of, for example, both Tennyson and Carlyle), she also made “fancy pictures”, posing her sitters in literary, historical, religious or picturesque mises-en-scène. She was at her best with grand men and young girls, believing that women shouldn’t be photographed between the ages of 18 and 80.
The V&A’s exhibition (until February 21)of more than 100 of her photographs celebrates the bicentenary of her birth and the 150th anniversary of her first exhibition at the museum and shows why she is regarded as so much more than a chronicler of eminent Victorians. She had been interested in the new art of photography even before her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera at the age of 48: “I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl-house I had given to my children became my glass house!” The prints that emerged were often deliberately out of focus and showed the blotches and smudges of the development process as well as fingerprints and intentional scratches — marks left to indicate the creativity of the enterprise, a photographer’s brushstrokes.
While some people criticised these imperfections the critic Coventry Patmore thought Cameron was “the first person who had the wit to see her mistakes were her successes”. It was an astute comment. Using huge 15 inch by 12 inch negatives she showed her sitters emerging from the dark, just as their images would gradually materialise in the darkroom. Her grave subjects — from Alice Liddell to her friend the shock-haired astronomer Sir John Herschel — have a more than documentary presence. These are not records of appearance but carefully wrought images intended to resonate: “It is the dull quiet surface of a photograph,” she wrote, “that constitutes I think the harmony of the work.”
Beauty was the central concern too of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79). In 1864 she wrote that “My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.” Primarily a portraitist (she took the definitive pictures of, for example, both Tennyson and Carlyle), she also made “fancy pictures”, posing her sitters in literary, historical, religious or picturesque mises-en-scène. She was at her best with grand men and young girls, believing that women shouldn’t be photographed between the ages of 18 and 80.
The V&A’s exhibition (until February 21)of more than 100 of her photographs celebrates the bicentenary of her birth and the 150th anniversary of her first exhibition at the museum and shows why she is regarded as so much more than a chronicler of eminent Victorians. She had been interested in the new art of photography even before her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera at the age of 48: “I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl-house I had given to my children became my glass house!” The prints that emerged were often deliberately out of focus and showed the blotches and smudges of the development process as well as fingerprints and intentional scratches — marks left to indicate the creativity of the enterprise, a photographer’s brushstrokes.
While some people criticised these imperfections the critic Coventry Patmore thought Cameron was “the first person who had the wit to see her mistakes were her successes”. It was an astute comment. Using huge 15 inch by 12 inch negatives she showed her sitters emerging from the dark, just as their images would gradually materialise in the darkroom. Her grave subjects — from Alice Liddell to her friend the shock-haired astronomer Sir John Herschel — have a more than documentary presence. These are not records of appearance but carefully wrought images intended to resonate: “It is the dull quiet surface of a photograph,” she wrote, “that constitutes I think the harmony of the work.”
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