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IMPRESSIONIST PHOTOGRAPHY
artists including Frank Reynolds and Henry Brock. It
ceased publication in 1993.
Orla FitzpatrickSee also: Claudet, Antoine-François-Jean;
Daguerreotype; Archer, Frederick Scott; Dry Plate
Negatives: Non-Gelatine, Including Dry Collodion;
Wet Collodion Negative; Barnard, George N.; Half-
tone Printing; and Fenton, Roger.Further Reading
Brothers, Caroline, War and photography: a cultural history,
London: Nishen, 1988.
De Vries, Leonard, History as Hot News 1842–1865: The World
of the Early Victorians As Seen Through the Eyes of The Il-
lustrated London News, London: John Murray, 1995.
Hannavy, John, Roger Fenton of Grimble Hall, London: Gordon
Fraser Gallery, 1975.
Lee, Alan J, The origins of the popular press in England:
1885–1914, London: Croom Helm, 1979.
Sinnema, Peter W, Dynamics of the pictured page: represent-
ing the nation in the Illustrated London News, Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1998.IMPRESSIONIST PHOTOGRAPHY
In the fall of 1890, George Davison gave a paper at the
Royal Society of Arts called “Impressionism in Pho-
tography.” He aimed to connect modern photography
with modern art, explaining that the “newer school of
photographers” and “the body of painters known as
impressionists” embraced the same principles: “Our
impressions are made up of light and light values in
relation to one another—colour, form, binocular vision
effect, focus, perspective.” Davison rejected what he saw
as the idealism of much photographic art, and argued
instead for “a close observation of natural appearances
under the materialistic tendency of the age” (Davison
1890, 823, 821). He distinguished between representa-
tions predicated on verisimilitude, and those arrived at
through the personal interpretation of an artist, citing
French and British texts such as Ernest Chesneau’s The
Education of the Artist (1886) and Francis Bate’s The
Naturalistic School of Painting (1887).
Davison provided a coherent reading of key formal
and philosophical elements of the aesthetic, yet im-
pressionism was a slippery notion. The very name was
speculative; of the eight exhibitions of ‘impressionist’
painting in Paris, none used that appellation, which
fi rst appeared in Louis Leroy’s satirical 1874 review of
the fi rst exhibition (partly inspired by Claude Monet’s
painting, Impression; Sunrise). Émile Zola called the
new painters ‘naturalistes,’ and quite correctly, for the
tenets of impressionism overlapped with naturalism and
realism. This also pertained to photography; Peter Henry
Emerson argued that while “Impressionism meansthe same thing as naturalism,” he preferred the latter,
in which the work of art “can always be referred to a
standard—Nature” (Emerson 1889, 22). Indeed, early
‘impressionist’ photographs are nearly indistinguishable
from their ‘naturalistic’ counterparts. Both embraced the
iconography of landscape and rural genre, and even the
practitioners, such as Alexander Keighley and Lyonel
Clark (see, the Linked Ring), were much the same.
In an 1891 article on art photography, James von
Falke presented three defi nitions of impressionism.
The fi rst two accorded with the acknowledged percep-
tual basis, being “the reproduction of the impression
made on the artist’s eye,” and the impression “which
a landscape produces on the spectator’s eye by virtue
of its inherent character.” The third version was that
“understood in artistic circles, namely, the dissolving
and indefi niteness of the forms and tones” (von Falke
1891, 393). This tallied with Leroy’s criticism of the
indefi nition in Impression; Sunrise, and it conformed
to the explanation given by Alfred Brothers in 1892.
Defi ning the “attempt to produce by photographic means
an imitation of what is called the ‘Impressionist’ school
of art,” he identifi ed the principal “effect” as the produc-
tion of an image being “what is called ‘out of focus”
(Brothers 1892, 302).
In part, this simply extended the popular equation
of naturalistic photography and diffusion. A more di-
rect provocation came from Davison’s use of pinhole
photography, fi rst linked to impressionism at the 1889
Photographic Society exhibition, when the Daily Tele-
graph described Davison’s “soft, impressionist work
caught through a pinhole.” Pinhole apertures originally
had a scientifi c application, and only became practical
for imaging once fast dry plate negatives shortened the
exposure time. From 1888, they were used for a soft-focus
effect, as were single lenses and slit apertures. Whereas
naturalistic photography’s analytic approach to vision
and representation utilised selective focus, the uniform
diffusion of pinhole photography accorded with the more
synthetic experience of the ‘impression.’ All of this was
incorporated in a long-standing argument about focus and
diffusion (see art photography and aesthetics). Indeed,
both impressionist painting and photography adopted
established pictorial models; Monet based Impression;
Sunrise on the traditional ‘ébauche,’ or painted sketch.
In 1888, the British photographer Graham Balfour
suggested diffused focus as a photographic version
of the summary execution practised by impressionist
painters. A similar intention encouraged the adoption
of manipulative processes such as direct carbon print-
ing on Artigue paper (Charles Constant Puyo), brush-
developed platinum printing (Joseph T. Keiley and
Gertrude Käsebier), and additive marking on negatives
(Frank Eugene), while in 1898, Fritz Matthies-Ma-
suren recommended gum prints for “simple, painterlyHannavy_RT72353_C009.indd 737 7/5/2007 11:33:25 AM