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Robinson & Cherrill
Watching the Lark, Borrowdale
1868
Albumen silver print
24.4 x 20.2 cm
National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada
No. 32672
LL/63289
Curatorial description (accessed: 6 December 2015)
This photograph is known as a combination print because it combines two negatives -- one by Henry Peach Robinson of his daughter Maud sitting on a grassy knoll at an outdoor studio, the other a landscape view of the Borrowdale region made by Robinson's business partner N.K. Cherrill. The scene was inspired by a line from Wordsworth's poem, "To a Skylark." The specific line from the poem which the albumen print illustrates is "Up with me, up with me into the clouds." Henry Peach Robinson was encouraged to become a professional photographer by Dr. Hugh Diamond, an amateur photographer himself. Robinson once said that he was inspired by the work of the "pre-raphaelite" artists, whose paintings he viewed while they were displayed at the Great Exhibition in 1851. His use of combination printing was perhaps his most important contribution to the history of photography. This process was being experimented with as early as 1855, and the British photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander had mastered the technique by 1857.
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