Across the Transepts of Westminster Abbey

Wide interior view across the transepts of Westminster Abbey, the Plantagenet coronation church begun under Henry III in 1245 on the site of Edward the Confessor's earlier Romanesque abbey, and continued in the Early English and Decorated Gothic styles. Photographed by Frederick H. Evans in 1911, during the Country Life magazine commission that was made possible by a rare circumstance: the abbey was closed to the public for several weeks before the coronation of George V (22 June 1911), allowing Evans to install his large-format plate camera in the empty nave and crossing and work at the very long exposures his platinum signature required — impossible with worshippers present. By then Evans — formerly a London bookseller and friend of Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw — had been the subject of a major Royal Photographic Society exhibition (1900) and had seen his cathedrals published in Camera Work plate 4 (October 1903) and plate 16 (October 1906). He worked exclusively in platinum and, increasingly, platinum-palladium, refusing all retouching on the principle that the negative alone must carry the architectural fact. Held at the Library of Congress, Washington (Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ds-00277), with companion prints from the Westminster campaign at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. At Maison Picturale, the image is reinterpreted as a contemporary platinum-palladium print on 640 g/m² cotton paper, using the reformulated non-toxic chemistry of Vision Picturale — the noble-metal signature of platinum preserved without the historical dichromate toxicity, signed by our master printers.

Reference file : Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons