The Miners' Bridge, on the Llugwy, North Wales (1857): Art, History and Details

The Miners' Bridge, on the Llugwy, North Wales (1857) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869).

The work and its context

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

Roger Fenton was a versatile and prolific artist who abruptly ended his brief, 12-year career as a professional photographer to return to the practice of law. Nevertheless, his architectural and landscape photographs have brought him recognition as the greatest British photographer of the 1850s. In this picturesque scene, Fenton focused on a single figure ascending a precarious wooden bridge that hangs suspended between two craggy surfaces. He often included people in his photographs to indicate scale and to enliven the composition. Fenton's wet collodion negative rendered the texture of the riverbed in minute detail, transforming the dark tones of the rocks and the random pattern of the light-colored lichens into a lively, abstract design. The slow speed of the negative, relative to the swift movement of the stream, turned the rushing water into a dense, white cloud.

Object facts

• Title: The Miners' Bridge, on the Llugwy, North Wales
• Date: 1857
• Creator attribution: Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 36.7 x 42.9 cm (14 7/16 x 16 7/8 in.); Matted: 55.9 x 71.1 cm (22 x 28 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1990.33

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hinson, Tom E. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63-147.
• 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.