Roger Fenton

Roger Fenton British, 1819-1869

Despite the relative brevity of his career, Roger Fenton stands among the most important and accomplished British photographers. Born in Heywood, Lancashire, to a wealthy family, Fenton graduated from University College in London and in 1844 may have studied painting in the Paris studio of Paul Delaroche, along with several other important future photographers. After returning to England, he spent four years earning a degree as a solicitor, continued to paint, and developed an interest in photography before joining a London law firm in 1851.

Fenton's paintings were shown annually in London at the Royal Academy from 1849-51. After helping to found the Calotype Club (1847), in 1852 he published an article that advocated establishment of a British photographic organization modeled after the Société héliographique in France. His argument, combined with the lifting of the use restrictions on William Henry Fox Talbot's patent for the calotype, led to formation of the London Photographic Society; Fenton served as its first honorary secretary. In December 1852, an early exhibition of the new society included 39 of his views. Soon afterward, he accompanied his friend Charles Vignoles to Russia to photograph the construction of a bridge at Kiev. Traveling to the Crimea in 1855, Fenton was the first photographer to make a sustained sequence of war views. He also accepted commissions to document the collections of the British Museum and to photograph the royal family at Buckingham and Windsor castles.

Among Fenton's best work are his photographs of landscapes and architecture. His still lifes are exceptional. His views -- whether of great expanses of garden and lawn, of Balaklava, or of fishermen at a local stream -- have an artistic consistency, grandeur of vision, and command of technique comparable only to the work of Édouard Baldus in France and Carleton E. Watkins in America. In 1862, judging the quality of photography to have declined, Fenton sold all his equipment at auction and returned to the law. His negatives were bought by Francis Frith, whose publishing concern continued to print them in various formats for the next hundred years. T.W.F.

Text © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023