“A Winter’s Sunrise” is a gem of a picture: a misty, hazy, background, up through which the sun is vainly struggling, and is all but obscured, its production must have presented obstacles which only the most patient adept in the photographic art could have surmounted. The old bridge in the middle distance, and the trees at the back of it, naked but for a flimsy leaf swinging here and there- these come out with absolute perfection. whilst in the foreground every blade of the long marsh grass stands up or lies down as nature ordained, and with a sharpness of detail which no realistic painter could surpass.” —The Fishing Gazette, Saturday, January 11th, 1896, p.15

Much has been written of P.H. Emerson’s final volume of masterful photographs reproduced in photogravure titled Marsh Leaves, published in 1895. The source material came from 16 earlier plates taken by the artist in 1890-91 during his one-year cruise aboard the wherry Maid of the Mist while navigating and exploring the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads. Beginning in the late 1880s and during this period he was also learning the art of photoengraving from Walter L. Colls. His 1893 volume On English Lagoons would be the first illustrated with plates etched and printed by himself, followed by these more refined and nuanced East Anglian scenes translated into delicate photogravure impressions.

“Emerson’s final photographic book Marsh Leaves was published five years after he renounced the belief in photography’s fine art status. In many ways paradoxically his most artistic volume, it is comprised of his most personal writings, only obliquely linked to his most exquisite images of pure landscape. Self-consciously composed as a conclusion for his decade in the photographic arena, it is his final statement of art and life, as well as a farewell to the private pictorial sphere that East Anglia had been to him.“—Ellen Handy: Imagining Paradise: The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at George Eastman House, 2007. p. 193