Charles Thurston Thompson and his Portuguese Project: The Real World Understood as Material for Exhibition

Abstract

Charles Thurston Thompson’s work in Santiago de Compostela has occupied stagefront among all of his photographs. Probably for this reason, it is much less known that the Portuguese royal collections and a few Portuguese locations were the primary purpose for his travelling to Iberia. Santiago was an unforeseen interruption. John Charles Robinson, as principal voice behind acquisitions in the South Kensington Museum, was the background Eminence in these enterprises. Here, I piece together the sojourn in Portugal and interrelate — technically, methodologically, and stylistically — the Iberian photographic work with the broader corpus by Thurston Thompson.