Door of the Hospital of Santa Cruz, Toledo, Spain

The raking light from a midday sun animates the extravagant ornamentation of this building facade while the rich reddish-brown coloration of the print offers a visceral sense of the stone building material. For this view, Charles Clifford directed his camera on the facade of a former hospital turned into a museum. The architectural design is known as plateresque, a Spanish movement in the 16th century characterized by intricately detailed relief ornament applied to the surface of buildings. With commissions from the queens of both Britain and Spain, Clifford was the most important 19th-century photographer active in Spain.