The quote by French painter Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) used on the title page is significant: P.H. Emerson, in addition to being a photographer, saw himself as an anthropologist— his preferred subject matter for his camera being the hard-scrabbled and hard-working country folk of Norfolk and Suffolk. Similar to Millet, the Barbizon school painter who became renowned for his depiction of peasant subjects in their naturalistic settings, Emerson was directly influenced by these French painters whose painted landscapes embraced realism for its own sake.

Pictures

of

East Anglian Life

Illustrated with Thirty-two Photogravures and Fifteen Small Illustrations

WITH GENERAL AND DESCRIPTIVE TEXT

AND THREE APPENDICES

BY

P. H. EMERSON, B.A., M.B. (CANTAB.)

JOINT-AUTHOR OF “LIFE AND LANDSCAPE ON THE NORFOLK BROADS”

AUTHOR OF “PICTURES FROM LIFE IN FIELD AND FEN”

“It must be an enormous vanity or an enormous folly that makes certain men believe that they can rectify the pretended lack of taste or the errors of Nature. On what authority do they lean? With those who do not love her and who do not trust her. she does not let herself be understood, and retires into her shell. She must be constrained and reserved with them? And or course they say: ‘The grapes are green. Since we cannot reach them, let us speak ill of them.’We might here apply the words of the prophet, ‘God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.’ ” Jean-François Millet. (1.)

LONDON

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON

St. Dunstan’s house

FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.

1888

{All Rights Reserved}

1. Although Millet’s quote can indeed be attributed to him, appearing in the appendix to the 1881 volume Jean-François Millet, Peasant and Painter by Alfred Sensier, the first sentence appeared in the 1688 volume Les Caractères, by French philosopher and moralist Jean de La Bruyère. (1645-1696) The later reference to “the grapes are green” is from Aesop’s Fables; with the artist properly crediting the Bible in the last sentence. (source: internet search, 2025)