Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. John Ruskin English, Fribourg Pencil, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper All rights reserved.
Although this picture was exhibited by Robinson as a discrete work, it also served as a study for the central figure in his most famous photograph, Fading Away, of Purportedly showing a young consumptive surrounded by family in her final moments, Fading Away was hotly debated for years.
On the one hand, Robinson was criticised for the presumed indelicacy of having invaded the death chamber at the most private of moments. On the other, those who recognised the scene as having been staged and who understood that Robinson had created the picture through combination printing a technique that utilised several negatives to create a single printed image accused him of dishonestly using a medium whose chief virtue was its truthfulness.
Perhaps intended to facilitate the process of combination printing, the unnaturally black background serves also to envelop the figure in palpable melancholia. The historian and art critic, John Ruskin, had a great influence in Great Britain not only on the Pre-Raphaelite movement created in , but on the development of early photography in the s. The leading Pre-Raphaelite painters, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown and their followers, wished to change the pictorial conventions laid down by the Royal Academy, and in order to demonstrate the transformations in modern life, invented a radically new idiom marked by bright colours and clarity of detail.
Pre-Raphaelite painters and photographers frequently made similar choices of subjects, and the photographers, particularly Julia Margaret Cameron, David Wilkie Wynfield and Lewis Carroll, were often had close links with the painters. Stillman and Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, experimented with the new process of wet plate collodion negatives that allowed much greater image detail, and achieved similar effects.
