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Édouard Baldus
Cheminee du Louvre
1858 (taken) 1869 (print)
Heliogravure
9 x 11 ins
Archive Farms
Object No. 2016.589
LL/90779
Kate-Addleman-Frankel, After Photography?, The Photogravures of Edouard Baldus Reconsidered, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2018, pg 44
Plate 30 from Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries. Motifs d'architecture et de decoration ensembles et details tires des constructions executees au nouveau Louvre et au Palais des Tuileries, sous la direction de M. Lefuel. Paris: J.E. Ogier, 1869 (in three parts). This was Baldus first pubication of his own photographic work in photogravure form. 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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