Portrait of Paul Chenavard, from the series "Histoire des Artistes Vivants"
Édouard Baldus (French, 1813–1889)
c. 1852
- Medium
- albumen print from wet collodion negative
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image: 17.6 x 13.2 cm (6 15/16 x 5 3/16 in.); Paper: 46.6 x 31.8 cm (18 3/8 x 12 1/2 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Photography
- Credit line
- Alma Kroeger Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Édouard Baldus, best known as an architectural photographer, took this portrait as an illustration for the entry on painter Paul Chenavard in Théophile Silvestre’s History of Living Artists French and Foreign: Studies after Nature. This ambitious and innovative project featured lengthy biographies of contemporary artists illustrated with photographic portraits. Some entries also had photographic reproductions of the artist’s paintings—possibly the first time that occurred in a publication. The books attest to the importance and interconnectedness of contemporary art and photography in the mid-1800s.
