Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)

La rade de "Toulon," September 1852

Salt print from a paper negative

23.6 x 33.1 cm

This graceful view shows the harbor of Toulon, an historically significant port city in the south of France. During the monarchy’s heyday, Toulon was known as the southern base for the French Royal Navy, whose southern fleet was named la Flotte du Levant. The port also played a central role in the French Revolution. In 1793, then Artillery Commander Napoleon Bonaparte successfully countered the British fleet acting on behalf of the city’s royalist rebellion. Orchestrating a siege on the port city and declaring victory over British ships lead to Napoleon’s promotion to General. The rich historical and symbolic connections between Napoleon, the French Navy, and Toulon were revisited by the President of the Second Republic, Louis-Napoléon. Organizing an official visit to Toulon by fleet in late September 1852, the ceremonial landing was intended to evoke the past glories of his imperial namesake and uncle. At the end of that year, the president announced the dawn of France’s Second Empire, and adopted the new title of Emperor Napoleon III.

In spite of his initial opposition to the Emperor’s politics, Nègre followed the goings-on of the new government closely. In this view, Nègre documented Louis-Napoléon’s official visit to Toulon after arriving from Marseille. The work inspired critic Henri de Lacretelle to describe in fanciful detail what he saw as more than a mere document:

“la Rade de Toulon, with its belt of mountains bluer still than its sky and its sea; on the waves the squadron of ships and on the jetty the populace awaiting the arrival of the President of the Republic, reveals, by the depth of tone, that on the photographer’s side there is in M. Nègre a painter of considerable merit, who knows how to seize the sky’s palette of rays, like those he traced in so many works of such wam coloring"

Whereas the fleet is plainly visible in the photograph, the crowd of cheering onlookers is nowhere to be found, proving a descriptive embellishment by a critic known to use hyperbole. The writer was more interested in what he considered the photographer’s ultimate aim of advancing the range of formal expression in the new medium. Indeed, the print shows Nègre to be less concerned with documenting the military pageantry that formed the purpose of the leader’s visit.

This early harbor view stands in marked contrast to those by Gustave Le Gray (1820‒1884) commemorating Queen Victoria’s official visit to the port of Cherbourg in 1858, a full six years after Nègre’s work at Toulon. Here, Nègre employs a painter’s eye in combination with the new tools of the camera and the salt print. He cloaks the harbor’s far-away commotion in a soft spread of sepias, ochres, and tans, warm tints befitting the Mediterranean setting and the arid slopes of Mont Faron, the natural backdrop to the city and its harbor. — Jacob W. Lewis

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)

Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge, circa 1845

Salt print from a calotype negative

16.4 x 20.8 cm on 19.6 x 25.0 cm paper

Talbot, who discovered photography on paper in 1839, was a Cambridge man. At first it may seem counterintuitive that he photographed far more in Oxford than in his own university city. However, Oxford was much easier to reach from his home at Lacock, especially with the introduction of the new railways. When he did photograph in Cambridge, it is not at all surprising that Talbot turned his camera towards the Bridge of Sighs. While the 1624 date on the "New Library" building suggests antiquity, the celebrated Bridge of Sighs was a response to a much more modern problem. It had been completed in 1831, just a few years before Talbot’s photograph, to allow expansion across the only remaining available space, the river. According to Talbot scholar, Larry Schaaf "the Venetian Bridge of Sighs took its name from its role in connecting the Doge's Palace to the public prisons. Talbot's photograph replicates this feeling for Cambridge. Symbolically bright on the left of Talbot's image is the relative freedom of the halls of residence. On the right, shrouded in dark mystery, are the symbols of power and restraint, the chapel and the administrative offices."

Talbot’s use of light here is exquisite. He timed his exposure for that brief period during the day while the ancient college buildings on the right were in deep shadow, bringing out the bridge out in relief. The relatively long exposure time of the calotype allowed the water to flow into a silvery mass. The shadow in the lower left completes the framing.

The undated but waxed negative is still in nearly perfect condition, with only a couple of flaws that would be visible in all the prints. (1937-2254, Talbot Collection, National Media Museum, Bradford)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)

The French and English fleets, Cherbourg, 4-8 August 1858

Albumen print from a collodion negative

30.9 x 40.4 cm

Le Gray’s seascapes brought him immediate international recognition for their technical and artistic achievement. This print is a prime example of the naval views for which Gustave Le Gray was celebrated.  Here he applied the many lessons he had learned in the making of seascapes since 1856. Without recourse to combination negatives that marked his practice in other examples of the genre, the present view was recorded in a single large glass negative. The photograph was made during the official visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the port of Cherbourg and its newest construction, the “Bassin Napoléon III,” a remarkable product of naval engineering that greatly expanded the port facilities to accommodate France’s modern fleet of battleships. On the invitation of Napoleon III, between August 5 and 8, the royal couple viewed a demonstration of France’s modern fleet in several maneuvers.

Eugène Colliau (French, active 1850s-1860s)

Vague Brisée, Le Havre, circa 1859

Albumen print from a glass negative

22.3 x 31.5 cm

Jean-Baptiste Emile Colliau (1826-1884), aka Eugène Colliau, worked as a civil servant in the French Ministry of Finance before taking up photography in the late 1850s. He learned the wax paper negative process from Gustave Le Gray and exhibited marine views and landscapes, some remarkably similar to Le Gray's at the Société française de photographie (SFP) in 1859 and 1861. In 1859 he founded a studio and printing establishment in Montmarte with Costet as a partner from which they published Le Gray's photographs of Guiseppe Garibaldi's Palermo campaign in 1860, including his well-known portrait of Garibaldi himself. - Patrick Montgomery

Hugo van Werden (German, 1836-1911)

Iron Pilot Boat at Krupp Firing Range, 1870s

Albumen print

24.6 x 34.6 cm

German industrialist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Krupp (1812-1887) hired Hugo van Werden, a distant relation, as a trainee in his firm’s Engineering Workshop in 1854. Three years later, he was working as a draughtsman in the Technical Office.  Early in 1861, van Werden was sent to Hanover to learn photography.  Upon his return to Essen, he set up the Krupp works’ photography studio.  As Alfred Krupp’s first full-time photographer, van Werden’s family connection facilitated his access to the private grounds as he documented all aspects of Krupp’s operations, including the business plant, new technical developments and trials of materials.  Van Werden’s strikingly proto-modernist photographs unite Alfred Krupp’s pioneering conception of photography’s role in advertising and entrepreneurship with his own artistic vision of the medium to show the complex interrelationships of steel – or more broadly, industry – and society.  This is the first in a series of three photographs.

John Beasley Greene (American, born in France, 1832-1856)

Greene's barque on the Nile, 1853-1855

Waxed paper negative

24.8 x 31.7 cm

Greene was a student of the noted photographer Gustave Le Gray in Paris who, as Eugenia Parry writes, was “a magician of change who inspired and shaped the genius of John Beasley Greene.” In 1853, the 21 year old Greene made the first of two voyages to Egypt as a photographer and archaeologist. His early death at age 24 left the exquisite Egypt pictures as both his legacy and his memorial to photographic art..

As Greene's work in Egypt evolved he began to place greater emphasis on evoking a place than merely strictly describing it. Greene's negatives were produced with the specific intention of creating positive prints and yet, any wider understanding of the artist must acknowledge the integrity of these negatives independent of this use. The luminous aura accompanying the reversal of the normal experience of light and shade which these objects produced, ensured their status as an equally valued component of artistic output. The beauty and the originality of the work of J.B. Greene lies in his own romance with the dark field of the paper negative.

Robert Howlett (English, 1831-1858)

The Great Eastern, view of the hull, 1857

Albumen print from a glass negative

23.3 x 29.5 cm

Howlett was a partner at the Photographic Institution, a leading professional studio in London. In 1857 the London Times commissioned him to document the construction of the steamship, Great Eastern. The images were published by the Illustrated London News on 16 June 1858.  Photojournalism was an emerging medium in the 1850s, but Philip Henry Delamotte’s (1821-1889) earlier photographic record of the reconstruction of the Crystal Palace increased the public appetite for images of great modern feats of engineering.

The photographs were taken with a large sliding box camera. In this image, one sees how Howlett emphasizes the ship’s unprecedented scale to convey a sense of awe and spectacle.

The giant ship was built at John Scott Russell’s shipyard at the Isle of Dogs, London. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great Victorian engineer, it took four years to build. At 692 feet long it was over twice the length of any earlier ship. At 22,500 tons it weighed six times more than any existing ship and was the largest man-made object ever built at the time. It took three months to launch in 1859 because of its size.

The Great Eastern was a symbol of Great Britain’s national pride and industrial supremacy. It was designed for the route to India and Australia but never sailed to either destination. Pressures geopolitical and financial ultimately rendered the Great Eastern redundant. Tragically it was sold for scrap in 1888.

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)

The port at Toulon, circa 1853

Salt print from a collodion on glass negative

15.3 x 19.7 cm

This work marks one of Nègre's earliest forays into the wet collodion on glass process first introduced in 1851 by the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer. Nègre made The port at Toulon, along with a few collodion negatives of Cannes and Grasse, likely during a visit to the south of France sometime in the summer months of 1853, prior to his return to Paris where he used the collodion process to make genre figure studies.

Paul-Marcellin Berthier (French, 1822-1912)

Bineau Bridge, over the Seine, at Courbevoie, 1865

Albumen print from a collodion negative

26.4 x 35.7 cm

The Bridge at Courbevoie was painted by Georges Seurat in 1886-1887 (collection of The Courtauld, London) showing the island location of his most famous painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Vincent van Gogh painted The Bridge at Courbevoie in 1887 (collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), one of series of 30 river scenes and landscapes along the Seine in Paris.