Wenlock Abbey
Medium
Albumen silver print from paper negative
Dimensions
21.4 x 27.2 cm. (8 7/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Paul F. Walter, in memory of Christopher Hemphill, 1987
Accession Number
1987.1183.44
Tags
Art Historical Context
Alfred Capel Cure's *Wenlock Abbey* (1858) captures the evocative ruins of the medieval Cistercian abbey inropshire, England, a site founded in the 12th and largely destroyed during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. This albumen silver print from a negative reflects the mid-19th-century fascination with Gothic architecture and picturesque decay, as photographers like Cure documented Britain's historic landmarks amid the rise of antiquarian interest and the Gothic Revival movement. Printed using the calotype process—invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s—the ...
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...