Thornton
Medium
Albumen silver print from paper negative
Dimensions
Image: 21.4 x 26.9 cm (8 7/16 x 10 9/16 in.) Mount: 32.5 x 37.9 cm (12 13/16 x 14 15/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Paul F. Walter, 2009
Accession Number
2009.460.3
Tags
Art Historical Context
Alfred Capel Cure's *Thornton* (1860) captures the evocative ruins of Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire, England—a once-grand Cistercian monastery founded in the 12th century. This albumen silver print from a negative exemplifies the mid-19th-century fascination with Gothic architecture and picturesque decay, a romantic ideal that blended historical reverence with the sublime beauty of nature reclaiming human works. Cure, a British army officer and pioneering amateur photographer, documented such sites with a keen eye for light and texture, preserving vanishing medieval heritage amid the Industri...
About the Artist
Alfred Capel Cure · 1826–1896
Alfred Capel Cure (1826–1896) was a British artist whose career unfolded during the Victorian era, a period of remarkable diversity and ambition in British art. Active in a landscape tradition shaped by the achievements of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, Cure worked at a time when watercolor and drawing held an especially prominent place in English artistic culture, embraced both by professional...