ROBINSON, HENRY PEACH

born 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, Eng. died Feb. 21, 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent English photographer whose composite photographs and writings made him one of the most influential photographers of the last half of the 19th century. As a young man of 21, Robinson was an amateur painter precocious enough to have one of his paintings hung at the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, photography gradually became his real passion, and in 1857 he opened a portrait studio in Leamington. He soon tired of commercial portraiture and began to make what were then called high-art photographs, which imitated the anecdotal genre paintings popular at the time. Such photographs as Juliet with the Poison Bottle (1857), his earliest known work, were made by combining many preliminary sketches into a composition that was realized as a composite photograph, a picture formed by pasting together parts of several photographs. Although he sometimes used natural settings, he more often imitated the out-of-doors inside his studio. Moreover, the figures in his many bucolic scenes were played by costumed actors or society ladies, since he found country folk too awkward and dull to fit his ideal of the picturesque. In 1858, Robinson exhibited Fading Away, a picture skillfully printed from five different negatives. This work depicted the peaceful death of a young girl surrounded by her grieving family. Although it was made clear that the photograph was the product only of Robinson's imagination, many viewers felt that such a scene was too painful to be tastefully rendered by such a literal medium as photography. The controversy, however, made him the most famous photographer in England and the leader of the high-art photographers. Robinson's subsequent works, such as The Lady of Shalott (1861) and Autumn (1863), were so widely admired that he published Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), a handbook that remained for decades the most influential work in English on photographic practice and aesthetics. In 1886, however, it was violently attacked by the photographer Peter Henry Emerson, who argued that photographic images should never be altered after exposure and decried Robinson's practice of using costumed models and painted backdrops. Nevertheless, Robinson continued to receive official honours, and in 1892 he became a founder-member of the Linked Ring, an association of the world's most prestigious art photographers.