Poplars and Pollards on the Lea, Near Broxbourne
1880s
Medium
Photogravure, plate XIX from the album "The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, Volume I" (1888)
Dimensions
Image: 16.6 × 12.7 cm (6 9/16 × 5 in.); Paper: 19 × 14.8 cm (7 1/2 × 5 7/8 in.); Album page: 32 × 24.8 cm (12 5/8 × 9 13/16 in.)
Classification
photogravure
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
145617
Art Historical Context
Peter Henry Emerson's *Poplars and Pollards on Lea, Near Brox* captures the serene English countryside along the River Lea in the1880s, evoking the quiet pleasures of angling depicted in his illustrated album *The Compleatler or the Contempl Man's Recreation, Volume I (1888). Inspired by Izaak Walton's 17th-century classic on fishing and rural life, Emerson—a pioneering photographer and advocate for "naturalistic" photography—sought to portray everyday scenes with unmanipulated realism, rejecting the soft-focus pictorialism popular at the time. This photogravure, plate XIX, showcases pollard t...
About the Artist
Peter Henry Emerson · 1856–1936
Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was born on May 13 at his family's sugar plantation, La Palma Estate, near Encrucijada, Cuba, to an American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson, and British mother, Jane Harris Billing. A distant relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Morse, he spent his early childhood amid the island's landscapes before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, during the American Civil War ...