[Girl Holding Flower]

Known until recently as only a painter and draftsman of portrait, religious, and allegorical subjects, Jean-Baptiste Frénet was also a remarkably fine photographer. Like so many other painters, he took up the camera in the mid-1850s as an amateur, eventually abandoning the other arts to dedicate himself to photography as a professional. Characteristic of the painterly and engaging images from Frénet’s painting days—when his family and friends were his models and his garden was his studio—is this touching portrait of a young woman holding a rose, nestled among the foliage.