Past Exhibition

In Light of the Past: Twenty-Five Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art

Grapes and flowers arranged on a tabletop in front of a dark background fill this horizontal photograph. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but is printed in warm tones of golden and dark browns. The tabletop runs parallel and close to the bottom edge of the composition. It seems to be made of marble and a striped cloth folds over the front edge of the table to our left. Dark grapes are bunched around a vase at the middle of the composition. The vase's tall oval body and long, tapering neck are painted with decorative scrolls and curlicues. A few pieces of small round fruit, perhaps plums, rest on the table in front of the vase. A gleaming goblet to the left and a small figurine of a young boy with a sheaf of wheat to our right are almost lost in the profusion of roses, lilies, hyacinth, and other flowers that fill the space around and behind the objects. The top corners of the photograph are curved, creating a shallow arch.
Roger Fenton, Fruit and Flowers, 1860, albumen print, Paul Mellon Fund, 2005.52.4

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    West Building, Ground Floor, East Outer Tier Galleries
Grapes and flowers arranged on a tabletop in front of a dark background fill this horizontal photograph. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but is printed in warm tones of golden and dark browns. The tabletop runs parallel and close to the bottom edge of the composition. It seems to be made of marble and a striped cloth folds over the front edge of the table to our left. Dark grapes are bunched around a vase at the middle of the composition. The vase's tall oval body and long, tapering neck are painted with decorative scrolls and curlicues. A few pieces of small round fruit, perhaps plums, rest on the table in front of the vase. A gleaming goblet to the left and a small figurine of a young boy with a sheaf of wheat to our right are almost lost in the profusion of roses, lilies, hyacinth, and other flowers that fill the space around and behind the objects. The top corners of the photograph are curved, creating a shallow arch.
Roger Fenton, Fruit and Flowers, 1860, albumen print, Paul Mellon Fund, 2005.52.4

Overview: Some 175 masterpieces will be featured from the National Gallery's photography collection, all acquired within the last quarter century. Highlighting exquisite nineteenth-century works and turn-of-the-century pictorialist photographs; exceptional examples of international modernism from the 1920s and 1930s and seminal mid-twentieth-century American photography; as well as photographs exploring new directions in color and conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition demonstrates the richness of the National Gallery’s photography collection and showcases the vitality of the medium as an art form, from its birth through the end of the twentieth century.

The curators of the exhibition are Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, and Diane Waggoner, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

Organization:  The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art.

Sponsor: The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Trellis Fund.

Attendance: 59,478

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