The wealthy baron and gentleman farmer Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard was among the earliest French artists to try his hand at paper-negative photography. 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.