Reviews

Abstract

Anyone who has had to struggle with the unwieldy early volumes of Country Life, often in deteriorating leather bindings, will thank Mitchell Beazley for undertaking this handsome series of books featuring photographs from the early years of the magazine. In reproducing these photographs, originally executed as glass-plate negatives and now in the vast picture archives of Country Life, Mitchell Beazley has also helped to document this fragile art form. The first two volumes of this series — Michael Hall, The English Country House, from the Archives of Country Life, 1897–1939 (1994) and Marcus Binney, The Chateaux of France, Photographs by Frederick Evans, from the Archives of Country Life, 1906–1907 (1994) — address architecture; of interest to garden historians is the third volume, Brent Elliott's The Country House Garden, from the Archives of Country Life, 1897–1939 (1995). Readers may also wish to take note of the account of the founding of Country Life (drawn largely from John Cornforth's The Search for a Style, Country Life and Architecture, 1897–1935 [London, 1988]) in Hall's volume, and both he and Binney discuss the activities of Country Life's chief photographers, such as the understudied Charles Latham or the more well-known Frederick Evans, a member of The Linked Ring, a tum-of-the-century photo society devoted largely to pictorialism. It is the well-deserved attention to the photographs, often magnificently reproduced, that distinguish these volumes from Cornforth's earlier investigation of Country Life.