When photography arrived on the scene in the 1820s, landscape painting was in rude health. Caspar David Friedrich was filling vistas with Romantic fervour, Turner and Constable were each transforming the genre in very different ways and Corot was taking painting en plein air to new heights. But after Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in 1839, photography began to rival painting as a way of capturing the outdoors. Landscape photography quickly took root in the UK and over the last two centuries the country’s natural grandeur has inspired photographers to document the land in ways that range from the purely artistic to the scientifically or politically driven. The Yale Center for British Art is celebrating the variety of landscape photography in Britain – and by Brits abroad – since 1840 (23 July–24 January 2027). Though there are plenty of modern and contemporary works on display, the highlights are arguably the 19th-century photographs, including a dramatic view of the Bay of Naples by Henry Stuart Wortley and negatives of flora by Bessie Rayner Parkes.
Find out more from the Yale Center for British Art’s website.
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