Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age

Brilliant exhibition at Tate Britain looking at how the advent of photography changed are and how artists and photographers worked together and influences each other.

I have wanted a show on this topic for a while as I think photography had a profound effect on painting as it no longer needed to be an accurate record of its subject as that could be done with a photograph, instead it could move into more experimental areas. Also different way of looking through the world via a camera or photograph gives new views of the world such as truncated figures, views from above etc.

It was interesting to see how often in the early days of photography there had been close relationships between artists and photographs. Often an artist would use photographs instead of sketches and many photographers were recording the work of artists. I particularly liked the work of Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill in Edinburgh from their great panoramas of Edinburgh and the work for the Disruption Portrait with 457 figures many recorded for the painting using photographs.

There was a good section looking at Ruskin’s idea of ‘close looking’ and how he used photography in that getting his valet John Hobbs to learn about photography. It looked at how photography could record a fleeting light effect. Another section looked at the use of photography to provide models for paintings from nude studies pictures of classical art and using a photograph to build tableaux. I came across a wonderful female photographer Clementine, Lady Howerden who I’d seen before in an exhibition in Dublin.

Another gallery looked at how painting also influenced photography with photographers starting to reproduce the effects of Whistler paintings.  It then looked at the effect of early colour photography and I loved a picture of Ottoline Morrell by Adolphe de Meyer showing he in a purple dress from 1907.

Closed on 25 September 2016.

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