Sebastopol from Cathcart's Hill
1855
Medium
Salted paper print from glass negative
Dimensions
Image: 21.9 x 34.7 cm (8 5/8 x 13 11/16 in.) Mount: 41.7 x 57.2 cm (16 7/16 x 22 1/2 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mrs. Walter Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.68
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Sebastopol from Cath's Hill** (1855) by Roger captures a pivotal moment in the Crimean War (1853–1856), offering a distant yet haunting view of the besieged Russian port city of Sebastopol from the British vantage point of Cathcart's Hill., a pioneering British photographer was dispatched as the first official war photographer, arriving in 1855 amid brutal winter conditions and heavy Allied bombardment. This salted paper print from a glass negative reveals the scarred landscape—trenches, tents, and distant fortifications—evoking the war's grinding attrition without graphic violence, a delibe...
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...