Giorgio Sommer
Dog, Pompeii

Public Domain

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Images(3)

Artist Giorgio Sommer (Italian, born Germany, 1834–1914)Italian, born Germany, 1834–1914

CultureItalian

Titles

Dog, Pompeii

Datec. 1870

Place depictedPompeii, Italy

MediumAlbumen silver print from glass negative

DimensionsImage: 11 3/16 × 14 13/16 in. (28.4 × 37.6 cm)
Sheet: 19 3/8 × 25 3/16 in. (49.2 × 64 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Buddy Taub Foundation, Dennis A. Roach and Jill Roach, Directors

Object number2014.258

Not on view

Explore Further

Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionSommer and his employees traveled through Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Switzerland, and Austria making photographs for the tourist trade, but his most compelling images are those made close to home at the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. This graphically powerful, eerily affecting, and preternaturally modern photograph depicts a cast made at Pompeii by pouring plaster into the void left by the remains of a dog engulfed in volcanic ash and mud during the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. One 19th-century critic aptly made a connection between such casts and photography itself: “The photographs . . . reveal with a fearful fidelity the dreadful agonies of some of those who perished at Pompeii, and, while looking at the pictures, it is very difficult to divest the mind of the idea that they are not the works of some ancient photographer who plied his lens and camera immediately after the eruption had ceased, so forcibly do they carry the mind back to the time and place of the awful immurement of both a town and its people.”
ProvenanceInstitut Catholique de Paris; (Sale: Ader, Paris, November 17, 2013 [Lot 00112] in a lot of 12; James Hyman, London
Exhibition History“A History of Photography II: Selections from the Museum's Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 17–July 19, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed in pencil on verso mount, upper left: PH / 4098
Inscribed in pencil on verso mount, upper right: AD(?) 135/348.../ 5183/253

Printed on verso mount, center: I.C (in a circle)

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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