Fountain at St. Sulpice
Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879)
1851
- Medium
- Salted paper print
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image/paper: 20.7 × 15.8 cm (8 3/16 × 6 1/4 in.); First mount: 21.8 × 16.7 cm (8 5/8 × 6 5/8 in.); Second mount: 49.4 × 39.3 cm (19 1/2 × 15 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Mary and Leigh Block and Nagel Family Funds
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Charles Marville is best known for his photographs of Paris at a time of enormous change, documenting its transformation from a dark, crowded city into one of grand boulevards and public parks. This picture, made in the year Marville began taking photographs, shows the monumental fountain just outside the church of Saint-Sulpice, which had been completed only a few years earlier. Marville produced his negative on paper, which lends the image a grainy softness that many photographers in his day prized over the sharper quality found in metal-plate daguerreotypes and glass negatives.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0