The Arbor (Julia Hall McCune) (1906): Art, History and Details

The Arbor (Julia Hall McCune) (1906) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Clarence H. White (American, 1871–1925).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Clarence Hudson White was a pioneer of the American pictorialist vision. For more than 25 years, he helped shape the style and, by extenstion, the direction of 20th-century photography through his work as a practitioner, leader, teacher, and mentor. He was primarily a family photographer, who enjoyed posing his family and friends in intimate interiors against a window or outdoors at dawn or dusk. He enhanced his negative's soft quality by printing on platinum paper, a medium that renders the middle tones of a print with great sensitivity. In this image, White posed one of his favorite models, Julia Hall McCune, a family friend and student, in an arbor. McCune appears lost in thought. Her face is partially bathed in a soft light that heightens the quiet, meditative mood of the scene.

Object facts

• Title: The Arbor (Julia Hall McCune)
• Date: 1906
• Creator attribution: Clarence H. White (American, 1871–1925)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: platinum print
• Dimensions: Image: 23.8 x 19.3 cm (9 3/8 x 7 5/8 in.); Paper: 25.7 x 19.3 cm (10 1/8 x 7 5/8 in.); Matted: 45.7 x 35.6 cm (18 x 14 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 1900-1950
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1980.159

Collection credit

Gift of John Flory, Elizabeth Flory Kelly, and Phoebe Flory

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.