Picturesque Sensibility

This exhibition features photographs from a disassembled nineteenth century British album recently purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. The album includes work by leading British art photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson, Francis Bedford, Valentine Blanchard and Stephen Thompson whose photographs encompass many of the dominant pictorial interests and styles of the 1860s.

Their choice of subject matter—ruggedly romantic landscapes, crumbling ancient churches, genre scenes, architectural studies and photographs of European countries —reflects the picturesque sensibilities common to most Victorian photographers of this period and the tastes of the public who avidly bought their work.