Alvin Langdon Coburn at Moor Park

Abstract

Alvin Langdon Coburn and Henry James first met in 1905 in the United States. Their acquaintance was renewed in England in the following year and developed into an important relationship. A well known feature of this was their collaboration on the New York edition of James's works; Coburn photographed symbolic scenes which were used as frontispieces. The year 1906 also marked Coburn's initial visit to Moor Park, a fine eighteenth-century house in Hertfordshire. There he took the first of what was to become an archive of photographs of the property; the owner, Lady Ebury, became his pupil and collaborator in the publication of Moor Park Rickmansworth in 1915. Although the book was conceived some years after Coburn first met James, and the photographs in it were taken on different occasions during the intervening period, it is imbued with the spirit of the James-inspired illustration project. In James's The Spoils of Poynton the owner is forced to leave to make way for her son and his fiancee. Lady Ebury left Moor Park because it was sold; thus the photographs in Moor Park Rickmansworth can be read symbolically as a memorial to a vanishing way of life.

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