"Painting With Light: Art and Photography From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age," represents a pioneering exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. The exhibit runs until September 25 of this year.
As the Tate Gallery explains, the purpose of the innovative exhibit is to "explore the painters that inspired early photographers and the photographs that changed painting. This exhibition celebrates the visual links between early photography and British art, bringing together fascinating vintage photographs and stunning paintings including Pre-Raphaelite, aesthetic and impressionist works."
The Gallery also notes, "Spanning 75 years across the Victorian and Edwardian ages, the exhibition showcases the experimental beginnings of photography right through to its flowering as an independent international art form. These are displayed alongside the paintings which they inspired and which inspired them. This is the first time works by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, JAM Whistler, John Singer Sargent and others will be shown alongside photographs by pivotal early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Alvin Langdon Coburn."
Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die.’ PHOTO: ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
The Wall Street Journal highlights this gallery exhibit in its own Arts in Review piece. Art critic Richard Cork notes, "The images produced by women photographers look especially impressive. Julia Margaret Cameron, who based many photographs on poems by her great friend Alfred Lord Tennyson, stands out with 'Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die' (1867). The young woman pictured in profile is Tennyson’s dying heroine Elaine, longing for the knight Lancelot. With her blanched face turned up and eyes almost closed, she looks completely withdrawn from the life of the world. Cameron may well have been inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 'Beata Beatrix,' a painting begun several years earlier. It was intended as a portrait of his wife, the artist Elizabeth Siddall, but Rossetti put it aside after her death in 1862."
This is one exhibit I'd love to see firsthand.