- Title
- St. Bartholomew-the-Great Church, Tomb of Prior Rahere
- Date Made
- circa 1895
- Medium
- Platinum print
- Dimensions
- Image: 4 1/2 × 3 1/2 in. (11.43 × 8.89 cm)
Primary support: 4 1/2 × 3 1/2 in. (11.43 × 8.89 cm)
Secondary support: 12 9/16 × 9 3/8 in. (31.91 × 23.81 cm)
Mat: 16 15/16 × 14 in. (43.02 × 35.56 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2008.40.723
- Collecting Area
- Photography
- Curatorial Notes
Frederick H. Evans’s first profession was as a bookseller in London. Around 1890, he began to photograph English and French cathedrals, establishing a reputation with his architectural images and electing to pursue a career in the medium. His photographs of ecclesiastical architecture are both spiritual and precise. He would wait hours for the right light, and he negotiated with the deans of cathedrals to remove modern fixtures in his quest for historical authenticity. He took this photograph in St. Bartholomew the Great, a twelfth-century church and hospital in London’s West Smithfield district. The ornate tomb sculpture, commemorating the church’s founder, Rahere, dates to around 1400. Evans’s choice of the platinum printing process conveys a sense of lustrous stone in a full gamut of warm grays—although, in fact, the tomb sculpture is decorated with multicolored paint. Evans gave up photography after World War I, when platinum became prohibitively expensive.
Britt Salvesen
2024
