Frederick Henry Evans 1853-1943

Collection of Evan Evans, the photographer’s son

Acquired from the above by Michael Hoffman, New York, 1968

Acquired by Margaret W. Weston from the above, 1982

Monterey Museum of Art, Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston, January - April 2003

Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston (Monterey Museum of Art, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 29 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

Suzanne Lange, Degrees of Stillness: Photographs from the Manfred Heiting Collection, Vol. I (Köln Photographische Sammlung, 1998), p. 79

Mark Haworth-Booth, The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839-1900, (Aperture, 1984, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 180

This rare and distinctive landscape by Frederick Henry Evans showcases the photographer's unmatched dexterity with the platinum print process, as well as his abilities with the landscape form.  While Evans is best-known today for his incomparable series of photographs of Gothic cathedrals, his landscapes were highly praised at the time of their making.  Reviewing Evans's exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in 1900, one critic wrote that a landscape in one of Evans's photographs was 'represented as no one else has done it . . . Very few men are so equal, and we recall none who is so equally strong in three departments [architecture, landscape, and portraiture]' (quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Frederick H. Evans, George Eastman House, 1964, p. 12). 

The present image, with its complex interplay of bare poplar trees and their reflections in a pool of water, is radically different from most of the photographer's other landscape studies, which are far more conventional in their approach.  There is only one image reproduced in the Evans literature that relates closely to Crepuscule au Printemps: another vertical-format study of poplars by water entitled Reflets dans l'Eau (Beaumont Newhall, Frederick Evans: Photographer of the Majesty, Light, and Space of the Medieval Cathedrals of England and France, Aperture, frontispiece).  The fact that both photographs are titled in French suggests that they were made in France.  Both of these images, in which poplar trees and sky figure so prominently, look forward to the work Alfred Stieglitz would do with the same subject matter at Lake George, New York, three decades later. 

At the time of this writing, only two other prints of Crepuscule au Printemps have been located: in the Manfred Heiting Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (accession number 2004.445), and in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, now part of the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford, England.