- Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée
Overall (Book): 18 1/2 × 25 3/16 × 2 in. (47 × 64 × 5.1 cm)
Portfolio case: 20 1/16 × 26 1/2 × 2 13/16 in. (51 × 67.3 × 7.1 cm)
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Commissioned to produce an album for the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM) railroad company, Édouard Baldus drew on a decade of work to present the products of Second Empire technology and engineering as the natural descendants of France’s architectural past. Stations, tunnels, tracks, and viaducts intermingled with Roman aqueducts and medieval cloisters. At a time when some argued that the railroad interrupted the landscape, erased local customs, and doomed the small towns that it bypassed, this album, with its blend of historic architecture, modern engineering, and natural landscape, celebrated the railroad as a powerful vehicle of political, economic, and cultural unification.
Provenance[Anaf Auction, Lyon, 1999]; purchased by Michael S. Sachs, Westport, Connecticut; given to MFAH, 2020.
Exhibition HistoryThis copy of the PLM album has not been exhibited. Other copies, as well as individual images that figure in the album, have been widely shown in exhibitions of nineteenth-century photography, surveys of the history of the medium, and shows exploring the relationship of photography and painting in 19th-century France.
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