Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée
- 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.
Published References Malcolm Daniel. "The Photographic Railway Albums of Edouard Baldus." Ph.D. Dissertation. Princeton University, 1991. Malcolm Daniel. "The Photographs of Édouard Baldus." Exhib. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. Maria Morris Hambourg, Pierre Apraxine, et al. "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century. Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection." Exhib. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993. Simon Kelly, April M. Watson, et al. "Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet." Exhib. cat. Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum, 2014. Richard Pare. "Photography and Architecture 1839-1939." Exhib. cat. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1982. "Trains: voyages en chemin de fer au 19ème siècle; exposition 1984, Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône, Musée Nicéphore Nièpce." Exhib. cat. Chalon-sur-Saône: Musée Nicéphore Nièpce, 1984. Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
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