C.141.dd.8

Imprint: London. Sampson Low. Marston, Searle, and Rivington. Crown Buildings, 188 Fleet Street, E.C. (All rights reserved) [1886].

Oblong folio, quarter-leather and maroon cloth boards (British Museum binding), measuring 290 x 420 mm, with the original decorative vellum front cover laid down over the front pastedown. The volume contains 40 platinum print views with tissue overlays (frontispiece and plates numbered 1-39), illustrating life on the Norfolk Broads, with descriptive texts by Emerson and Goodall. Goodall's extensive accompanying notes to plates 35-39 include a summary of the photographic credo informing Emerson's work in the volume, particularly in relation to painting and arguing for truth to nature in artistic representation. With regard to much contemporary painting, 'He is amazed at its falsity. Everywhere he sees work, often painfully elaborated, in which the first truths of nature find no expression...in which nature is belittled by an infinity of imitation detail which passes for finish, though in truth the work cannot be said to be begun even, as the big broad facts of tone are neglected...from bad training, they cannot see the great things for the small; they draw a leaf when they should paint a tree, and motes instead of the sunbeam.' Photography too had been infected by this point of view: 'Hitherto the chief aim of the photographer seems to have been a biting sharpness of detail in the negative, which is generally quite fatal to the result from an artistic point of view, for in breadth lies the beauty and sentiment of landscape. To produce a picture the photographer must select his lens and adjust his focus so as to get an impression as nearly identical with the visual one as possible; and he must print in such tone as will give the closest approximation to the values in nature...The prejudice existing against photography arises from the fact that hitherto it has been worked merely as a mechanical process; but if by results it can show that it is worthy, it will rank as a fine art...' His closing lines emphasise photography's unique ability to present the real world: 'The proper function of the artist is to observe, not imagine; he cannot paint the unseen...No dream of the imagination can ever compare with nature for beauty. Nature has always provided the subjects of the best paintings. The true mission of the artist is to awaken man to a sense of the beauty to be found in the life and landscape of to-day. The world around him and the people now in it should inspire all his work; his whole life should be devoted to the study and representation of the facts, the beauties, and the sentiment of nature.'