Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach Robinson (born July 9, 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England—died February 21, 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent) was an English photographer whose Pictorialist photographs and writings made him one of the most influential photographers of the second half of the 19th century.

At age 21 Robinson was an amateur painter precocious enough to have one of his paintings hung at the Royal Academy in London. Photography, however, was his real passion. In 1857 he opened a photographic studio in Leamington, England. In addition to commercial portraiture, he began to make photographs that imitated the themes and compositions of the anecdotal genre paintings popular at the time. He created photographs such as Juliet with the Poison Bottle (1857), his earliest-known work, by combining separate negatives into a composite picture, utilizing a process known as combination printing. Although he sometimes used natural settings, he more often imitated the out-of-doors inside his studio. Costumed actors or society ladies modeled for his many bucolic scenes, since he found actual country people too awkward and dull to fit his ideal of the picturesque.

In 1858 Robinson exhibited Fading Away, a picture skillfully printed from five different negatives. This work depicted the peaceful death of a young girl surrounded by her grieving family. Although the photograph was the product of Robinson’s imagination, many viewers felt that such a scene was too painful to be tastefully rendered by such a literal medium as photography. The controversy, however, made him the most famous photographer in England and the leader of the Pictorialist movement, which advocated achieving painterly effects in photography.

Robinson’s subsequent works, such as The Lady of Shalott (1861) and Autumn (1863), were so widely admired that he published Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), a handbook that for decades remained the most influential work in English on photographic practice and aesthetics. This work and essays by Robinson based on it were widely printed and translated, giving his aesthetic ideas great currency. In 1886, however, the book was violently attacked by the photographer Peter Henry Emerson, who argued that photographic images should never be altered after exposure and also decried Robinson’s practice of using costumed models and painted backdrops. Nevertheless, Robinson continued to receive official honours, and in 1892 he became a founding member of the Linked Ring, an association of prestigious art photographers.