Louis-Rémy Robert
1856 (ca)
[Table Top Still Life with Model Cathedral and Small Sculptures]

Salted paper print, from paper negative
20.0 x 26.1 cm (7 7/8 x 10 1/4 ins)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1987, Accession Number: 1987.1052
 
Curatorial description (Accessed: 10 January 2018)
Due to the slow speed of early photographic emulsions, outdoor still life was an important genre for the medium's first practitioners. Generally they photographed either the paraphernalia of the dooryard or garden-ladders, rakes, barrows, and the like-or they brought interior ornaments outside to arrange in the sunshine. Robert's still life of objects at Sèvres is an oddly dreamy mélange of exterior and interior, animate and inanimate. Vases are set among orange trees and sprites dance amidst Gothic and Rococo conceits on the dappled landscape of the tabletop.
 
LL/79858