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Hotel de Ville
et Pont d'Arcole, Paris
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Édouard-Denis Baldus (June 5, 1813,
Grünebach, Prussia – 1889, Paris) was a French landscape, architectural and railway photographer. Baldus was
originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman and
lithographer before switching to photography in 1849. In 1851, he was
commissioned for the Missions Héliographiques by the Historic Monuments
Commission of France to photograph historic buildings, bridges and monuments,
many of which were being razed to make way for the grand boulevards of Paris,
being carried out under the direction of Napoleon III's prefect Baron
Georges-Eugène Haussmann.
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Reconstruction of Hotel de Ville de Paris, 1880
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The high
quality of his work won him government support for a project entitled Les
Villes de France Photographiées, an extended series of architectural views in
Paris and the provinces designed to feed a resurgent interest in the nation's
Roman and medieval past.
In 1855,
Baron James de Rothschild, President of Chemin de Fer du Nord, commissioned
Baldus to do a series of photographs to be used as part of an album that was to
be a gift to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a souvenir of their visit to
France that year. The lavishly bound album is still among the treasures of the
Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
In 1856,
Baldus set out on a brief assignment to photograph the destruction caused by
torrential rains and overflowing rivers in Lyon, Avignon, and Tarascon. He
created a moving record of the flood without explicitly depicting the human
suffering left in its wake.
He was extremely
well known throughout France for his efforts in photography. One of his
greatest assignments was to document the construction of the Louvre museum.
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La Grande Galerie,
Paris, 1870
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Baldus used
wet and dry paper negatives as large as 10x14 inches in size. From these
negatives, he made contact prints. In order to create a larger image, he put
contact prints side by side to create a panoramic effect.
Baldus was
renowned for the sheer size of his pictures, which ranged up to eight feet long
for one panorama from around 1855, made from several negatives.
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| View of the Seine, Paris |
Despite the
documentary nature of many of his assignments, Baldus was no purist when it
came to technique. He often retouched his negatives to blank out buildings and
trees, or to put clouds in white skies; in one print from 1851, he pieced
together fragments of 10 different negatives to create a composite print of the
medieval cloister of St. Trophime, in Arles.
I will post more French artists in this blog for this event:
