NEW YORK — Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs is pleased to present Artists’ Studies: Photographs Made for Painters by Vallou de Villeneuve and Others 31 January through 30 April 2025. The exhibition opens in conjunction with Master Drawings New York and reflects the sometimes complex relationship between photography and painting with works by Vallou de Villeneuve, Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin, Bruno Braquehais, Sydney Richard Percy, Gustave Le Gray, and others. The photographs on display date from the 1850s when painters were still wary of the recently invented medium which was perceived as a threat to their livelihoods. Featured are several important works by Vallou, including a standing nude Courbet is thought to have used as the source for his muse in the monumental canvas “L’Atelier du Peintre” in the Musée d’Orsay.
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795-1866) was a French painter, lithographer and photographer. A member of the Société héliographique, in 1854 he helped found the Société française de photographie. Vallou created a rich photographic catalog of costumes and poses to make his pictures more marketable to painters. His photographic works are most closely associated with the painter Gustave Courbet who during the 1850s used some of Vallou's photographs as source material for his paintings. The formal affinities between Vallou’s photographs and the central nude figures in Courbet’s Bathers (1853) and The Painter’s Studio (1854-55) are notable. Recent scholarship by Dominique de Font-Réaulx has revealed that Vallou and Courbet shared a sitter, Henriette Bonnion.
Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin (1802-1875) first trained as a painter with Ingres. By 1849 he was selling daguerreotypes of nudes from his Paris studio before he began making photographic prints. He listed himself as a specialist in academies, or artist’s studies—a polite term for nude studies that often bordered on the pornographic—that were intended for artists to use as substitutes for live models. The vase in this albumen print of “Emma” is by Jules-Claude Ziegler, an accomplished ceramicist, painter, and photographer.
Gustave Le Gray’s (1820-1884) fine seascape, L’escadre française en rade de Cherbourg, was made with a single large glass negative. The photograph documents the official visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to celebrate the opening of the greatly expanded port of Cherbourg. On the invitation of Napoleon III, the royal couple and their retinue observed the French fleet’s maneuvers from the safety of their steam-powered yacht. This view depicts the French ships greeting the royal couple. Upon closer inspection, the ships aren’t the only element in formation. Behind the royal yacht is a three-mast French vessel, its upper rigging packed with dozens of standing sailors preparing to cheer and wave their hats in the air on signal. These agile sailors waving boisterously from the rigging of the fleet’s ships was what the artist Jules-Achille Noël recorded in his 1859 painting commemorating the event, Napoleon III Receiving Queen Victoria at Cherbourg, 5 August 1858, in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
Sydney Richard Percy (1821-1886), born into a family of notable painters, made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1842. Percy is a choice example of the interaction of painting and photography. During the 1850s he took up photography to produce source material for his own paintings. Percy was unapologetic in his use of the medium, a highly unusual stance during a period when most artists went to great lengths to hide the fact that they used photographs as a method of organizing their canvases. On view is Percy’s fine albumen print from a collodion negative, Gypsy girls, as well as three albums of 66 of his additional artist studies.
Created in the mid-nineteenth century with barely a nod to conventional practice, the photographs of nudes, branches of apples, and trees in L'Album Simart are filled with a great sense of purpose. Assembled circa 1856-1860, the album is the work of an unidentified photographer attributed to the circle of French sculptor Pierre Charles Simart (1806-1857). Large in format, this study of a male nude posed in a torqued gesture of dramatic action is charged with the same energy as a quick pencil drawing in an artist's sketchbook. With arms outstretched, head raised with eyes rolling heavenward, the model enacts a drama of physical and emotional strife, theatrics not uncommon in history painting.
Artists’ Studies: Photographs Made for Painters by Vallou de Villeneuve and Others will be on view at the gallery from 31 January through 30 April 2025.