Cooking House of the 8th Hussars
1855
Medium
Salted paper print, plate 51 from the album "Photographs Taken in the Crimea" (1856)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 15.3 × 19.6 cm (6 1/16 × 7 3/4 in.); Mount: 42.5 × 54.5 cm (16 3/4 × 21 1/2 in.)
Classification
salted paper print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
146154
Art Historical Context
Step into the gritty reality of 19th-century warfare with Roger Fenton's *Cooking House of the th Hussars* (1855), a salted print from his groundbreaking album *Photographs Taken the Crimea* (185). Captured during the Crimean—a brutal conflict pitting Britain, France, and the Ottoman against Russia—Fent image depicts the makeshift cooking tent of the elite 8th Hussars regiment. Amid the muddy camps near Sevastopol, this scene reveals the everyday hardships of soldiers, from simmering pots to cluttered gear, humanizing the troops far from home. As one of the first war photographers, Fenton hau...
About the Artist
Roger Fenton · 1819–1819
Roger Fenton (1819–1869), born into a prosperous Lancashire merchant family as the son of banker and MP John Fenton, initially pursued a scholarly path, earning a first-class BA from the University of London in 1840 before studying law at University College London. He abandoned these pursuits for art, training as a painter under the history painter Charles Lucy in London by 1847—the two became clo...