Curatorial description (3 December 2015)
This modern gelatin silver print was made in the 1960s from a negative by Bayard, because of the rarity of original salted paper prints by him. Employed by the Ministry of Finance in Paris as a young man, Hippolyte Bayard became interested in early experiments in photography that were being carried out by Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) and others in England, and by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) in France. He was a founding member of the Société française de photographie and the Société héliographique. Bayard tried his hand at making photographic images on paper prior to Daguerre's invention of a process for capturing images on polished silver plates. Within weeks of the official announcement of Daguerre's new process, Bayard was producing photographs that were a combination of this process and Talbot's negative-positive paper technique. He was paid to keep his discoveries a secret, possibly to avoid interfering with the celebrations associated with Daguerre's invention.
