Edouard Baldus - Paris Bourse, ca 1856-58

Maker: Edouard Baldus (1813-1889)
Born: Germany
Active: France
Medium: albumen print from a collodion glass negative
Size: 7 7/8 " x 11 1/4 "
Location: Paris, France

Object No. 2010.270
Shelf: B-4

Publication:

Other Collections: Canadian Center for Architecture, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Notes: stamped with signature stamp, inscribed 57 ( in negative, in unknown hand, on print,LL, recto). This small format photograph comes from a series of 95 Parisian views that Baldus produced early in the 1860s. While broadly recognized for his larger format photographs, Baldus took equal care in the production of his smaller format series. The same powerful balance of light, tonality and surface treatment, signature to Baldus's style, is clearly evident. Originally trained as a painter and having also worked as a draughtsman and lithographer before switching to photography in 1849, Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), became a central figure in the early development of French photography and acknowledged in his day as a pioneer in the still-experimental field, was widely acclaimed both for his aesthetic sensitivity and for his technical prowess. Establishing a new mode of representing architecture and describing the emerging modern landscape with magnificent authority, he enjoyed high patronage in the 1850s and 1860s. Yet, despite the artist's renown during his lifetime, his name is all but unknown today, his work savored only by connoisseurs. Baldus made his reputation with views of the monuments of Paris and the south of France, with dramatic landscapes of the Auvergne, with photographs of the New Louvre, and with a poignant record of the devastating floods of 1856. But it is his two railroad albums—the first commissioned in 1855 by Baron James de Rothschild for presentation to Queen Victoria, the second in 1861 by the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee railroad company—that are his greatest achievement. Here he brought together his earlier architectural and scenic images with bold geometric views of the modern landscape—railroad tracks, stations, bridges, viaducts, and tunnels—to address the influence of technology (of which both the railroad and the camera are prime examples). In so doing, Baldus anticipated the concerns of Impressionist painters a decade later and those of many artists of our own day, meeting his task with a clarity and directness not since surpassed. Beginning in the mid 1860s with this publication, and lasting until the early 1880s, Baldus primary commercial activity centered on the production of photogravures, a process he first explored in 1854. This work had nothing to do with promoting artistic photography or his own photographic work; instead it was an industrial application of photography that brought credit and financial gain to Baldus as an inventor and entrepreneur rather than an artist. (source: MET). Beginning in the mid 1860s, and lasting until the early 1880s, Baldus primary commercial activity centered on the production of photogravures, a process he first explored in 1854. This work had nothing to do with promoting artistic photography or his own photographic work; instead it was an industrial application of photography that brought credit and financial gain to Baldus as an inventor and entrepreneur rather than an artist.

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Taken on: February 7, 2011

Tags:

Baldus

Bourse

paris

1860

salted paper print « less

Sets appears in: • Paris • Edouard Baldus more » • Commercialization in France • France • Albumen Prints « less

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