Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, mounted on card
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edwin-smith-9824" aria-label="More by Edwin Smith" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Edwin Smith</a>
Lindfield Old Hall
Presented by Dorothy Free 2017
<p><span>Lindfield Old Hall</span> c.1950s is a black white landscape-format photograph. Its foreground is dominated by the base of a group of yew hedges, focusing on the lower trunk and branches; through these can be glimpsed a view of the East Wing of Lindfield Old Hall (or Old Place), showing a jutting peaked gable and chimneys of the nineteenth-century extension to this Tudor manor house at Lindfield in West Sussex. This is one of a group of works in Tate’s collection which demonstrate Smith’s work photographing vernacular architecture, for which he was best known (see also <span>Levens Hall, Northumberland</span> [Tate P14878] and <span>Biddenden, Kent</span> [Tate P14879], both from a similar period).</p>
paper print photograph gelatin silver mounted card
Lindfield Old Hall
support: 425 × 559 mm
Presented by Dorothy Free 2017
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<p>
<i>Lindfield Old Hall</i> c.1950s is a black white landscape-format photograph. Its foreground is dominated by the base of a group of yew hedges, focusing on the lower trunk and branches; through these can be glimpsed a view of the East Wing of Lindfield Old Hall (or Old Place), showing a jutting peaked gable and chimneys of the nineteenth-century extension to this Tudor manor house at Lindfield in West Sussex. This is one of a group of works in Tate’s collection which demonstrate Smith’s work photographing vernacular architecture, for which he was best known (see also <i>Levens Hall, Northumberland</i> [Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/smith-levens-hall-northumberland-p14878" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14878</span></a>] and <i>Biddenden, Kent</i> [Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/smith-biddenden-kent-p14879" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14879</span></a>], both from a similar period).</p>
<p>Trained as an architect, Edwin Smith had always painted (though rarely exhibited in his lifetime) and only took to photography in the early 1930s after he had left the architectural practice of Marshall Sisson and been given a camera by a friend. Even before then he had been struck by reproductions of the work of the French architectural and street photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927), that had been published in the <i>Architectural Review </i>in 1927 shortly after Atget’s death and which exerted an influence on Smith throughout his life. Between 1935 and 1939 Smith followed Atget’s example, photographing the street scenes and communities of people among the fairgrounds and circuses of London and Surrey, as well as the mining community in Ashington in Northumberland (see <i>Two Miners, Ashington Colliery</i> 1936 [Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/smith-two-miners-ashington-colliery-p14877" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14877</span></a>]). Smith had always asserted the objectivity of the camera eye – in 1936 he described his relationship with the camera as like ‘a divining rod finding its own peculiar water with myself a passive diviner’ (quoted in Cook 1984, p.8). Later, in 1971, he added to this by describing himself as like ‘The man who lives in his eyes continually confronted with scenes and spectacles that compel his attention or admiration and demand an adequate reaction. To pass on without pause is impossible … some real tribute must be paid. Photography, for many of its addicts, is a convenient and simple means of discharging this ever-recurring debt to the visual world.’ (Ibid.) His aim was to create an objective record of what he saw rather than foreground his own photographic skill.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, in the 1940s, his work turned away from people and communities to recording environments – landscapes and buildings; a move that was reinforced when he was commissioned by Thames and Hudson to photograph country churches for the book <i>English Parish Churches</i> (1952). This was the first of a series of such books, often with texts written by his wife Olive Cook, that included <i>English Cottages and Farmhouses (</i>1954) and <i>The English House through Seven Centuries</i> (1968). His approach with these photographs was to evoke the lives of those who lived and worked in those landscapes, characterised by views through, say, from garden to house, as in <i>Lindfield Old Hall</i>, or a straightforward record of the layering of time on a domestic cottage that slightly reveals change and the passage of time (such as the incongruous but barely noticed H-type television aerial on the chimney in <i>Biddenden, Kent</i>). </p>
<p>This sense of a passage of inhabited time – sometimes revealed through Smith’s focus on patina or palimpsest – allows his work of the 1940s and 1950s to sit comfortably alongside paintings and photographs that communicate a neo-romantic aesthetic. As such, Smith’s sense of cultural identity can be placed alongside Michael Powell (1905–1990) and Emeric Pressburger’s (1902–1988) cinematic vision held within films such as <i>A Canterbury Tale</i> (1944) and <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> (1946), the picturesque architectural paintings of John Piper (1903–1992) and the <i>Shell Guide</i> series of guidebooks to the counties of Britain. The art historian David Mellor’s retrieval of the history of neo-romanticism, through his exhibition <i>A Paradise Lost, The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935−55</i> in 1987, was punctuated by a group of twenty photographs by Smith from the 1940s and 1950s that offered one kind of commentary to that exhibition’s concern with ‘nostalgia and anxiety; myth making; organic fantasies; the threat of war and extinction’ (David Mellor, in <i>A Paradise Lost, The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935−</i>55, exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London 1987, p.9). More recently, the historian Kitty Hauser has revisited Mellor’s inclusion of Smith within a neo-romantic lineage. Although she has placed Smith similarly alongside Powell and Pressburger, and Piper, she has also positioned him in relation to the poet John Betjeman (1906–1984), the painter Paul Nash (1889–1946) and the photographer Bill Brandt (1904–83), as artists, filmmakers and writers who viewed the landscape with an ‘archaeological imagination’ (Kitty Hauser, <i>Shadow Sites; Photography, Archaeology &amp; the British Landscape 1927–1955</i>, Oxford 2007, p.30), for whom the landscape could be read in such a way as to reveal a continuum of change, stretching forward from the distant past to the present.</p>
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<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Olive Cook, <i>English Cottages and Farmhouses</i>, London 1954.<br/>Olive Cook, <i>Edwin Smith, Photographs 1935–1971</i>, London 1984.</p>
<p>Andrew Wilson<br/>August 2017</p>
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Summary
2018-05-09T00:00:00
summary
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