Interpretation
Robinson brought the art of photography into sync with British Academic painting of his time through popular, large-scale compositions such as When the Day's Work is Done. He used five negatives to create this unique combination print-note the appearance of dark "seams" wherever two negatives meet, as at the edge of the carpet in the foreground. Each negative contributes a distinct allegorical or narrative note. Winter vegetables in the foreground suggest the pious couple's agrarian labors, while the glimpse of town through the window hints at their distance from worldly affairs. Thanks to Robinson's printing technique, every detail appears in sharp focus, ready to be drawn into service in the homiletic reading prompted by the picture's title.
With the exhibition of Fading Away (1858), a melodramatic scene portraying a dying maiden and her mourning relatives, Robinson brought photography into sync with contemporary painting. His considerable fame grew with the publication of his Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869). The book offered an aesthetic credo and practical manual of combination printing — a painstaking procedure by which numerous details are photographed separately, at precisely matching scale, and the resulting negatives merged in a single print. Pictorial Effect remained in print for decades, finally making Robinson the target of a generation of critics who regarded contrivance in photography as an unforgivable vice. When the Day’s Work Is Done — an international prizewinner — brings five negatives into play, each contributing an allegorical or narrative note. Between the garden basket in the foreground (testimony to hours spent tilling the soil) and a distant town glimpsed through the window (scene of worldly temptation), an aged couple sits, she sewing and he reading from the Bible. Thanks to Robinson’s technique, every detail is in focus and thus ready to be drafted into service in the homiletic interpretation prompted by the picture’s title.
Information
- Title
- When the Day's Work is Done
- Object Number
- x1991-2
- Maker
- Henry Peach Robinson
- Medium
- Albumen print
- Dates
- 1877
- Dimensions
- image (sight): 54.3 x 75.7 cm. (21 3/8 x 29 13/16 in.) mount: 75.4 x 96 cm. (29 11/16 x 37 13/16 in.) frame: 70.2 × 91.8 × 2.2 cm (27 5/8 × 36 1/8 × 7/8 in.)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, anonymous gift
- Culture
- British
- Place made
- Europe, England, Royal Tunbridge Wells
- Techniques
- Margaret Harker, Henry Peach Robinson: Master of Photographic Art 1830-1901 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)., plate 79
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1991," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 51, no. 1 (1992): p. 22-78., p. 54
- Ellen Handy, "Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson" (Norfolk: Chrysler Museum, 1994)., not illustrated
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 324 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 376
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