Unknown
[Standing Male Nude]

Public Domain

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Images(3)

Artist Unknown

ArtistAttributed to the circle of Pierre-Charles SimartFrench, 1806–1857

CultureFrench

Titles

[Standing Male Nude]

Datec. 1856

MediumSalted paper print from an enlarged glass negative

DimensionsImage: 15 3/8 × 11 1/4 in. (39.1 × 28.6 cm)
Sheet: 15 3/8 × 11 1/4 in. (39.1 × 28.6 cm)
Mount: 18 9/16 × 15 3/16 in. (47.1 × 38.5 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Brown Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund

Object number2014.811

Not on view

Explore Further

Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionThe initial impulse behind this nude study was almost certainly to function in the service of art. Photographs of nudes frequently served as substitutes for the live model in the medium’s early days, but the scale and rendering here set this picture apart from other “studies for artists.” Here, a serendipitous technical flaw—perhaps the result of sensitizing the collodion-coated glass plates with too cold a silver solution—created a flowing pattern through which one views the figure. Whereas most photographers of the period would have wiped their plates clean and started over, this artist saw that, like a veil of time or memory, the surface pattern that seems to separate the viewer from the figure also removes the figure from the realm of the merely academic or utilitarian and places him instead in the world of art and poetry. He seems to radiate energy, amplifying the dynamic effect of the pose. In brazenly displaying the visible traces of its creation and in reveling in the effects of technical flaws and incompleteness, this nude appeals especially to a contemporary eye. The model, in a heroic pose reminiscent of a risen Christ or the ecstatic witness of a miracle, summons references to the past while being presented in a strikingly modern way, without any equivalent among other 19th-century studies for artists.
ProvenanceAlbert Gilles, Paris; André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes Collection, Paris, 1950s (complete album); [sold Sotheby’s, Paris, March 21, 2002, lot 113 (complete album)]; Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, Los Alamos, New Mexico (complete album); [Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Inc, New York], 2004 (complete album); purchased by MFAH, 2014.

Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed in pencil, mount verso: Chicago 217

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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