Brickfield on the River Bure (Norfolk)
c. 1883/87, printed 1888
Medium
Photogravure, pl. XX from the album "Pictures of East Anglian Life" (1888)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 12.9 × 27.8 cm (5 1/8 × 11 in.); Album page: 33.5 × 42.4 cm (13 1/4 × 16 3/4 in.)
Classification
photogravure
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
124628
Art Historical Context
**Brickfield on the River Bure (Norfolk)** by Peter Henry Emerson captures a poignant slice of rural industry in late 19th-century England Photographed around 1883–87 along the River Bure in Norfolk and printed as plate XX in Emerson's seminal 1888 album *Pictures of Eastlian Life*, this image depicts brickmakers at work amid the misty waterways of East Anglia. Emerson, a photographer and advocate for "naturalistic photography," sought to portray everyday peasant life with unposed authenticity, rejecting the staged compositions of his contemporaries. The photogravure medium—image/paper size 1...
About the Artist
Peter Henry Emerson · 1856–1936
Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was born on May 13 at his family's sugar plantation, La Palma Estate, near Encrucijada, Cuba, to an American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson, and British mother, Jane Harris Billing. A distant relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Morse, he spent his early childhood amid the island's landscapes before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, during the American Civil War ...