I picked up a delightful vintage art book, a collection of the bygone age paintings of A R Quinton, made famous by a huge number of Salmon postcards. Quinton's paintings spoke to me on several levels. One is the obvious romantic level of the gorgeous vintage colouring of the printed page, evoking a time long past and covering scenes from the places I hope yet to visit, particularly around Evesham and the Cotswolds. As a photographer the first thing I pick up is the colour, unrealistic, romanticised and quite possible to emulate within HDR programs such as Phtotmatix and perhaps with the Digital Filters within the menus of our cameras.
The composition is a lesson in itself, if we allow ourselves to stop and think about what the artist portrayed and how he did it. The placement of carts and horses, the placement of the people and, intriguingly, the tiny details as almost all the pictures of buildings have at least one open window. The implication of this is that the houses are lived in, open and welcoming.
Alfred Robert Quinton, 1853-1934, has left us a repertoire of delights and I for one have thoroughly enjoyed looking through the pages of his paintings. I don't know if the book is still available, but it was published by Salmon in 1978 and reprinted several times after that.
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Calibrate so you can see 16 different shades:
