Sebastopol from Cathcart's Hill
1855
Medium
Salted paper print, from the album "Photographic Pictures of the Seat of War in the Crimea" (1856)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 21.6 × 34.5 cm (8 9/16 × 13 5/8 in.); Mount: 40.3 × 53.1 cm (15 7/8 × 20 15/16 in.)
Classification
salted paper print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
123394
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Roger Fenton’s images from the Crimean War represent the earliest attempt to photograph a military conflict; the English public devoured the visual records, reproduced as engravings and published in newspapers, from the comfort of their drawing rooms. Fenton spent the spring of 1855 in the Crimea under extremely trying conditions, making about 350 pictures over the course of three and a half months. Scenes of active battle were impossible to capture given the limitations of photographic technolo...
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...