Frederick H. Evans

platinum print, on a hand-ruled mount, signed and titled in pencil on the mount, 1903

Lunn Graphics International, Ltd., Washington, D. C. 

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 1985

Collection of David and Mary Robinson, 1985

Fraenkel Gallery, 1994

Charles Holme, ed., Art in Photography, with Selected Examples of European and American Work (London, Paris, and New York: The Studio, 1905), GBXXII

Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to The Present Day (The Museum of Modern Art, 1964), p. 110

Beaumont Newhall, Frederick H. Evans (George Eastman House, 1964), p. 8

Beaumont Newhall, Frederick H. Evans: Photographer of the Majesty, Light, and Space of the Medieval Cathedrals of England and France (Aperture, 1973), p. 67

Mike Weaver, ed., The Art of Photography, 1839-1989 (Yale University Press, 1989), pl. 160

Anne Hammond, ed., Frederick H. Evans: Selected Texts and Bibliography (Oxford, 1992), p. 24

Anne M. Lyden, The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), frontispiece and p. 97

Robert A. Sobieszek, Masterpieces of Photography from the George Eastman House Collections (New York, 1985), p. 223

Edward Lucie-Smith, The Invented Eye: Masterpieces of Photography, 1839-1914 (New York, 1975), pl. 141

While Evans was a proponent of a straight and unenhanced mode of photography, he did do some careful retouching in several areas along the upper right edge of A Sea of Steps, presumably to downplay highlights that would have detracted from the gentle luminosity of the scene. This retouching is visible in other prints of the image. The photograph is essentially in excellent condition. Close examination shows Evans's own expert retouching in the upper portion of the image. The print appears to be tipped at the top corners to its mount, and affixed at the bottom corners with modern hinges. The mount is somewhat discolored and shows wear around the edges and on the corners. Evans's signature and wash border have faded somewhat.
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Frederick Evans was a master of the platinum process and used its long tonal range to render this complex composition in multiple subtly-transitioning shades of gray. Tipped to the photographer's meticulously-bordered exhibition mount, this print of Wells Cathedral: A Sea of Steps is the ideal presentation of Evans's most famous image. 

Evans’s approach to photographing ecclesiastical architecture was a methodical one, sometimes involving weeks or months of observation of the passage of light through a church’s interior. As Anne Lyden points out in her recent study of Evans’s work, it took several years of work at Wells Cathedral to produce an image that Evans felt adequately conveyed the drama of the space (The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans, pp. 15-16).  A Sea of Steps captures not only the monumentality of the 12^th-century early English Gothic structure, but also its endurance through the centuries.  As Evans wrote, ‘The steps now rise steeply before one, and the extraordinary wear in the top portions, leading to the corridor, is now shown just as it appeals to the eye in the original subject, a veritable sea of steps, the passing over them of hundreds of footsteps . . . have worn them into a semblance of broken waves, low-beating on a placid shore’ (ibid, p. 16).      

As of this writing, it is believed that only three other prints of this image have appeared at auction.