Fountains Abbey. The Chapel of the Nine Alters, Exterior

Art Historical Context

Step into the haunting beauty of Fountains Abbey this exquisite 1850s albumen silver print photographers Joseph Cundall and Henry Delamotte.uring the exterior of the Chapel of the Nine Altars, this image (23.5 x 28 cm) showcases the soaring Gothic arches and stone of one of England's most magnificent ruinedistercian monasteries, founded in 1132. The chapel's name evokes its original nine side chapels, a testament to medieval devotion now framed against the sublime Yorkshire landscape. In the dawn of photography,en prints like this one—made by coating paper with egg white and silver salts—revolutionized how we document architecture. Delamotte, renowned for his precise calotypes of historic sites, and Cundall, a pioneering publisher of illustrated books, brought unprecedented detail and tonal richness to these ruins. Popularized during the Victorian era's Gothic Revival, such photographs fueled Romantic fascination with decay and grandeur, preserving Fountains Abbey's majesty for posterity. Today, housed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1952), this print invites us to ponder the interplay of light and shadow on ancient stone, bridging 12th-century spirituality with 19th-century innovation. A perfect emblem of photography's power to eternalize the ephemeral.