Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard
Farm Hands at Work

CultureFrench
Titles
  • Farm Hands at Work
Date1851
MediumPaper negative
DimensionsImage: 9 × 7 1/16 in. (22.8 × 18 cm)
Sheet: 9 9/16 × 7 1/16 in. (24.3 × 18 cm)
Credit LineGift of Manfred Heiting, the Manfred Heiting Collection
Object number2004.393
Current Location
The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building
Gallery 208
Exposé

Explore Further

Department
Photography
Object Type
Description

At
roughly the same moment as the daguerreotype made its debut, the Englishman
William Henry Fox Talbot announced a rival process that, though not yet as
refined as Daguerre’s invention, would lay the groundwork for almost all
subsequent photography until the digital age. Talbot’s process produced a
negative on fine writing paper (not yet glass or film) that could, in turn, be
used to print multiple positive photographs on paper.





The
wealthy baron and gentleman-farmer Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard was among
the earliest French artists to try his hand at Talbot’s process. Clearly
attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in
17th-century Dutch painting and its early-19th-century French revival, Humbert
de Molard posed his caretaker Louis Dodier (standing in elegant contrapposto
and wearing wooden clogs) and other workers in a tableau of rural activity at
his château at Argentelle, in Normandy.




Provenance Research Ongoing Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
There are no further marks or inscriptions to note.
There is no evident signature.

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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