Since the inception of photography, discussions have focused around two aspect of the relationship of art and photography: the service that photography could provide artists as a drawing aid and whether it could become an art form in its own right.
Photographs allowed painters and illustrators to study forms and details that may have been overlooked while working in the field or in the studio. The two anonymous images, Oliviers en Provence and the woman with a bundle of twigs, seem to have been created as reference material for topographical and naturalistic artists.
Eugène Cuvelier’s 1860s landscape photography was purely an artistic pursuit. Subtle in its rendering of the scene and influenced by French Barbizon landscape paintings of the period, this image evoked the stillness and harmony of a track winding through the forest of Fontainebleau.
The independently wealthy photographer Julia Margaret Cameron aligned her work with the idealizing tendencies found in contemporary British art. Many of Cameron’s subjects embodied sacred and secular subjects, the common heritage of educated British society at the time. Her work hovers between portraiture and allegory, as can be seen in her ethereal Guardian Angel as well as in her illustration to Lord Alfred Tennyson’s series of connected poems The Idylls of the King.