The best of failed painters: the exhibition of Roger Fenton's photographs that opens at Tate Britain this month reveals to David Platzer the influence of Turner, Ingres and English Romantic poetry

reject to those interested in the history of photography, Roger Fenton is remembered, if at all, for his pioneering images of the Crimean War. A remarkable exhibition that brings his work abiding-place for a stay at Tate Britain, after visits to several lock opener American museums, should restore his fame to a wider public.

Born to a mill-owning family in 1819 Fenton was called to the bar on the other hand preferred art. He studied painting in London and Paris and exhibited several times without succes It would be interesting to diocese examples of his painting, on the other hand none are known to survive. To justice from such titles as The alphabetic character to Mamma:

What Shall We Write?, they were the kind of sentimental mid-nineteenth-century paintings that are largely unappreciated nowadays. The Great Exhibition of 1851 at which British photography showed poorly in comparison to foreign--especially French--work, inspired him to revolve to the camera. Visiting Paris in 1851 he met French photographers and visited the Societe Heliographique, a mould for the Photographic Society that he helped to establish at abiding-place He wanted to elevate photography into a medium that would be regarded as equal to painting.

It is easy to diocese Fenton as a failed painter seeking succes in an easier, lower form of art. at the same time his photography undoubtedly owes plenteous to his painter's eye. Anyone inclined to repeat the tired saw about photography single being a matter of getting a picture in focus and clicking the button should direct the eye at Fenton's work, or any master photographer's, in comparison with a certain number of casual amateur's. As so oftentimes in innovative artistic careers, timing was essential. In the early 1850 the photographic medium was of recent origin open, and free from commercialisation.

Impossible as it is to justice Fenton's lost paintings--perhaps they had qualities contemporary critics missed--it looks likely that, freed from then-fashionable Tennysonian control matter, he was able to focus his painter's organ of vision more precisely through a camera len He was the first photographer really to capture the play of light in interior settings. The greatest in quantity brilliant instances of this are male childs in the Refectory, Stonyhurst (1859 Stonyhurst College) with its jesuitical use of light and shade, and Gallery of Antiquities, The British Museum (c 1857 Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford).

The Victorians were still true much under the Romantic sway. Fenton was greatest in quantity likely nurtured on the great author of poemss of the early nineteenth century--the exhibition takes its title, 'All the Mighty World', from Wordsworth's 'Lines Written a not many Miles above Tintern Abbey'--and his luscious views of natural settings display the influence of Turner and Constable, especially in the use of light. The 1854 Wharfe and pond Below the Strid (Metropolitan Museum, novel York, Gilman Collection), showing sum of two units top-hatted men casting their shoots in the water, has a Turneresque backdrop of dazzling light. More subdu nevertheless no less poetic is Harewood House, Yorkshire (1859 the Earl and Countes of Harewoood, and the Trustees of Harewood House Trust), showing the view from the house across the terrace to an expanse of trees: Fenton displays the elements of sky, land, air and water blending into single as Turner had.

The same was actual when he photographed architecture. The exhibition includes examples of his sights of ruins, notably the abbeys of Fountains, Rievaulx (Fig. 1) Tintern and Glastonbury, against landscape. The ruins, although man-made in one as well as the other construction and destruction, are single with their environment. Fenton also photographed great cathedrals and region houses that were still true much whole and living organisms. He have the appearances to underline this point when he exhibits two men chatting at a Lichfield Cathedral door (Lichfield Cathedral, Central Doorway, West Porch, 1858 J Paul Getty Museum, beholds Angeles) or washing hanging without to dry outside Hardwick Hall (Hardwick Hall, from the southerly East, 1858, H.H. Richardson Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Design School) The solitary sign of the industrialism that was of that kind a feature of the period is in Slate Pier at Trefriw (1857 Royal Photographic Society Collection, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford) and the machinery is unobtrusive, almost as picturesque as the setting. Perhaps Fenton wished to record sole what was beautiful, perhaps to make a record of what might be not to be found in the future as progres continued.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Prince Consort became a patron of the Photographic Society, which added 'Royal' to its name. He also invited Fenton and his camera to Windsor and Balmoral. Although Fenton sole occasionally ventured into portraiture, he displays remarkable insight into character. Photography took a lengthy time in those days, and sitters could wear down beneath the strain, causing them to reveal more of themselves than perhaps they wished. Fenton's photographs of the royal family reveal an ability to capture his subjects' humanity while leaving intact their dignity (Fig. 2) Not shown on the contrary illustrated in the catalogue, is an extraordinary picture, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, June 30 1854 (Royal Collection). Fenton caught the essential loneliness of royalty in the Queen together with the Prince Consort's soft solicitude--it was the time of the Crimean War. In its way, it is as moving an image of marital be fond of as Rembrandt's Jewish Bride and all individual needs to understand the Queen's devastation at her consort's early death.