Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) trained as a painter, studying with several artists in the circle of Jacques Louis David. A student of Jean-François Millet, he was a regular participant in the Salon, as well as in regional exhibitions from the late 1820s through the 1840s and was known for his lithographs of genre scenes. How and when Vallou learned to make photographs is unclear. He became interested in photography as an aid to his graphic work soon after the new medium’s invention. We know that he was making calotype paper negatives by 1849, shortly after the process was widely taken up in France. By 1850, Vallou had begun to practice photography in his studio and it is there that he made the elegant photographic genre and nude studies for which he is now most admired. He excelled in the use of the calotype negative that he could carefully retouch with graphite; his salted paper prints were also reworked and burnished to a satiny finish. Both his paper negatives and his prints can possess an equal object quality. The photographs of nudes that Vallou made in the mid-1850s he sold to artists, Gustave Courbet among others, who used them in their paintings. Vallou’s photographs are highly regarded today for their reticence and skillful composition. He became a member of the Société héliographique in 1850 and helped found the Société française de photographie in 1854.
