| Dates: | 1813, 17 July - 1879, 1 june | | Born: | France, Paris | | Died: | France, Paris | | Active: | France | | Gender: | Male |
French photographer specializing in religious sites. He also took a series of about 400 images of roads that were to be destroyed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. A decade later he returned to the same localities to photograph the new roads.Preparing biographies
General reading
Aubenas, Sylvie & Roubert, Paul-Louis (eds.), 2010, Primitifs de la Photographie: Le Calotype en France 1843-1860, (Gallimard BNF) [Δ]
Rice, Shelley, 1999, Parisian Views, (The MIT Press) isbn-10: 0262681072 isbn-13: 978-0262681070 [Δ]
Readings on, or by, individual photographers
Chambord, Jacqueline (ed.), 1981, Charles Marville: Photographs of Paris, 1852-1878, (French Inst/Alliance Francaise) isbn-10: 0933444397 isbn-13: 978-0933444393 [Δ]
Marville, Charles, 1994, Marville Paris, (Hazan) [Δ]
Marville, Charles, 1997, Charles Marville, (Centre National de Photo) isbn-10: 286754100X isbn-13: 978-2867541001 [French] [Δ]
If you feel this list is missing a significant book or article please let me know - Alan - alan@luminous-lint.com | |
Family history
If you are related to this photographer and interested in tracking down your extended family we can place a note here for you to help. It is free and you would be amazed who gets in touch.
alan@luminous-lint.com |
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Exhibitions on this website |
 | Charles Marville: Château de Saint Germain-en-Laye |
|  | Charles Marville: Lampposts |
|  | Charles Marville: Old Paris |
|  | Charles Marville: Rural landscapes |
|  | Charles Marville: Vue du ciel de Paris, de la fenêtre de l'artiste |
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All photographs by this photographer
Charles Marville
French
Charles Marville was a painter and a lithographic artist, but he is most well known for his photographs of Paris in the 1860s. Unfortunately, there is not much information on Marville's life other than the impressive body of work he left behind. Sometime in the 1850s Marville was asked to document the old quarters of the French capital by the government's Commission for Monumental Historical Monuments. Marville purposely took the photographs of Paris's architecture and streets scenes when it was raining, so that the soft diffused light mixed with the rain on the cobblestone produced a picturesque image that elicited a feeling of perfection. One of Marville's good friends was Blanquart-Evrard and through the years he published many of Marville's images, including a group of his negatives of France and Germany in the album Art Religieux in 1854.
It has been said that Marville accomplished "documentary perfection" with his images of Paris before it was destroyed by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann's urban renewal projects. Marville's body of photographs is one of the few records left of Paris before 1870. Marville's work can be found in collections at the IMP/GEH in Rochester, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. A book containing many works by Marville entitled, Marville Paris was published by Hazan in 1994.
[Contributed by Lee Gallery]
| Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. | | Go to website | Grove Art Online (www.groveart.com) has a biography of this artist.
[NOTE: This is a subscription service and you will need to pay an annual fee to access the content.] | Show on this site | Go to website | | The Cleveland Museum of Art, USA has a biography on this photographer. [Scroll down the page on this website as the biography may not be immediately visible.] | Show on this site | Go to website |
The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
• Auer, Michele & Michel 1985 Encyclopedie Internationale Des Photographes de 1839 a Nos Jours / Photographers Encylopaedia International 1839 to the present (Hermance, Editions Camera Obscura) 2 volumes [A classic reference work for biographical information on photographers.]
• Beaton, Cecil & Buckland, Gail 1975 The Magic Eye: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company) p.70 [Useful short biographies with personal asides and one or more example images.]
• Capa, Cornell (ed.) 1984 The International Center of Photography: Encyclopedia of Photography (New York, Crown Publishers, Inc. - A Pound Press Book) p.320
• Lenman, Robin (ed.) 2005 The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [Includes a short biography on Charles Marville.]
• Weaver, Mike (ed.) 1989 The Art of Photography 1839-1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) p.461 [This exhibition catalogue is for the travelling exhibition that went to Houston, Canberra and London in 1989.]
• Witkin, Lee D. and Barbara London 1979 The Photograph Collector’s Guide (London: Secker and Warburg) p.188-189 [Long out of print but an essential reference work - the good news is that a new edition is in preparation.]
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If there is an analysis of a single photograph or a useful self portrait I will highlight it here. |
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