Exterior of North Fort Showing the English Entrance, August 21, 1860
1860
Medium
albumen print
Dimensions
image: 23.8 × 29.1 cm (9 3/8 × 11 7/16 in.) mount: 24.8 × 30.3 cm (9 3/4 × 11 15/16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Michael and Jane Wilson
Accession Number
2012.137.1.7
Art Historical Context
Step into the charged atmosphere of 19th-century conflict with Felice Beato's *Exterior of North Fort Showing the Entrance, August 21 1860*. This albumen print, captured mere days after the Anglo-French assault on the Tak Forts during the Second Opium War offers a poignant glimpse of imperial warfare's aftermath. Beato, a pioneering British-Italian photographer renowned for his-the-ground documentation of battles from the Crimean War to the Indian Rebellion, arrived at the North Fort just as British forces breached its defenses, immortalizing the scarred landscape and shattered gateway. The i...
About the Artist
Felice Beato
Felice Beato (c. 1832–1909), an Italian-born photographer who became a British subject through his family's residence on the British protectorate island of Corfu, emerged as one of the pioneering figures in war and travel photography. Born in Venice or Corfu to a Venetian noble family with roots in Corfu, Beato's early life remains somewhat obscure, but he acquired his first photographic lens in P...