This photograph is from a series by Tim Walker entitled Horse in House, photographed in July 1998 at Eglingham Hall, Northumberland for Italian Vogue, November 1998 issue.
Tim Walker is a British fashion photographer based in London. He studied at Exeter Art College, then worked as a freelance photographic assistant before working as Richard Avedon's assistant in New York. He went on to contribute to high-profile magazines including Vogue, W and Harper's Bazaar. He has also shot advertising campaigns for clients including Barneys, Comme des Garcons, Gap and Yohji Yamamoto, and now works predominantly for British and Italian Vogue. Walker's style is lavish and fantastical, often referencing earlier fashion photographs, paintings, or well-known children's stories, in particular the writing of C.S. Lewis, E.H. Nesbitt, T.H. White and Arthur Ransome.
In the early 1990s, as an intern at Vogue, Walker collated the magazine's collection of negatives by the British photographer Cecil Beaton. He draws much of his inspiration from Beaton's work from the nineteen-thirties, forties and fifties, thus there is an interesting link between Walker and the large number of Beaton photographs in the V&A collection. As curator and historian Robin Muir explains in the book Tim Walker: Pictures: 'Through the heritage of Vogue, [Walker] has re-established tangible links to the romantic strain that marked out Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton as latter-day Gainsboroughs and Zoffanys. He shares with them too a romantic 'spirit of place', more usually rural and paradisal. This, despite an international career, identifies him firmly and forever as an English photographer after their fashion.'