When the Day's Work is Done,

1877

With the exhibition of <em>Fading Away</em> (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 <em>Pictorial Effect in Photography</em> (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. <em>Pictorial Effect</em> remained in print for decades, finally making Robinson the target of a generation of critics who regarded contrivance in photography as an unforgivable vice. <em>When the Day’s Work Is Done</em> — 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.