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=== 'Impressionist' photography ===
=== 'Impressionist' photography ===
From 1906, Personnaz practiced the colour [[Autochrome Lumière|Autochrome]] process invented by [[Auguste and Louis Lumière]]. He first exhibited such pictures, made in [[Madrid]], by projection at the S.F.P. that year (the process produced transparencies, not prints). Overall he produced more than a thousand plates in that medium, the [[Film grain|grainy]] and [[Pointillism|pointillist]] rendering of which lends it an Impressionist quality.<ref name=":2">N. Boulouch, “Antonin Personnaz ou l’aventure d’un autochromiste”, Histoire de l’art, 13-14, 1991, p. 67-76.</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last=Kalba|first=Laura Anne|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gp14d|title=Color in the Age of Impressionism|date=2017-07-18|publisher=Penn State University Press|isbn=978-0-271-07980-6}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Heilbrun|first=Françoise|date=February 2009|title=Impressionism and Photography|url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03087290802582889|journal=History of Photography|language=en|volume=33|issue=1|pages=18–25|doi=10.1080/03087290802582889|issn=0308-7298|via=}}</ref> Such aesthetic qualities he ardently defended, and emphasised in making pictures at sites and of subjects depicted by the painters;<ref>Nathalie Boulouch, « Le miracle des couleurs », in Les couleurs du voyage. L’oeuvre photographique de Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, ed. Béatrice de Pastre, and Emmanuelle Devos, Paris: Paris Musées: Phileas Fogg, 2002, 51 {{quote|Il est vrai que Personnaz, qui tentera de définir une pratique de l’autochromie artistique, place parmi les sujets à privilégier part tout photographe “artiste”, les vues de paysages sous des atmosphères lumineuses avoisinant le lever ou le coucher de soleil.}}</ref> rural landscapes and peasant scenes, haystacks, river views, women with umbrellas, flowering apple trees, fields strewn with poppies and the painters themselves at work.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2020-08-11|title=Life in Colors : Antonin Personnaz Impressionist Photographer|url=https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/life-in-colors-antonin-personnaz-impressionist-photographer-dd/|access-date=2020-08-12|website=The Eye of Photography Magazine|language=en-US}}</ref> He urged other photographers to;
From 1906, Personnaz practiced the colour [[Autochrome Lumière|Autochrome]] process invented by [[Auguste and Louis Lumière]]. He first exhibited such pictures, made in [[Madrid]], by projection at the S.F.P. that year (the process produced transparencies, not prints). Overall he produced more than a thousand plates in that medium, the [[Film grain|grainy]] and [[Pointillism|pointillist]] rendering of which lends it an Impressionist quality.<ref name=":2">N. Boulouch, “Antonin Personnaz ou l’aventure d’un autochromiste”, Histoire de l’art, 13-14, 1991, p. 67-76.</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last=Kalba|first=Laura Anne|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gp14d|title=Color in the Age of Impressionism|date=2017-07-18|publisher=Penn State University Press|isbn=978-0-271-07980-6}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Heilbrun|first=Françoise|date=February 2009|title=Impressionism and Photography|url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03087290802582889|journal=History of Photography|language=en|volume=33|issue=1|pages=18–25|doi=10.1080/03087290802582889|issn=0308-7298|via=}}</ref> Such aesthetic qualities he ardently defended, and emphasised in making pictures at sites and of subjects depicted by the painters;<ref name=":3">Nathalie Boulouch, « Le miracle des couleurs », in Les couleurs du voyage. L’oeuvre photographique de Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, ed. Béatrice de Pastre, and Emmanuelle Devos, Paris: Paris Musées: Phileas Fogg, 2002, 51 {{quote|Il est vrai que Personnaz, qui tentera de définir une pratique de l’autochromie artistique, place parmi les sujets à privilégier part tout photographe “artiste”, les vues de paysages sous des atmosphères lumineuses avoisinant le lever ou le coucher de soleil.}}</ref> rural landscapes and peasant scenes, haystacks, river views, women with umbrellas, flowering apple trees, fields strewn with poppies and the painters themselves at work.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2020-08-11|title=Life in Colors : Antonin Personnaz Impressionist Photographer|url=https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/life-in-colors-antonin-personnaz-impressionist-photographer-dd/|access-date=2020-08-12|website=The Eye of Photography Magazine|language=en-US}}</ref> He urged other photographers to;
{{quote|“not limit [the autochrome plate] to producing dazzling tones, let us also turn our eyes to the master landscapists: the Cazins, the Monets, the divine Corot […] Let us be inspired by their examples by seeking to translate the the softest and most delicate colours in nature, and in this way we will make a work of art."<ref name=":2" />}} He also observed that; {{quote|"the Autochrome plate sees...with the precursor eye [of the] valiant Impressionists."<ref>Nathalie Boulouch, 'Edmond Becquerel, la photographie des couleurs et le paradigme de la rétine,' in proceedings of the conference ''Edmond Becquerel et la naissance de la photographie couleur'', Thursday 10 December 2015, organised by the Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation and sponsored by COMUE Sorbonne-Universités, at the [[National Museum of Natural History, France|Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle]]</ref> }}To overcome the limited exposure latitude of the medium, he acheived saturated colour in both subjects and background sky (which normally overexposed) by shooting with the sun directly on his subject, angled obliquely as it is in early morning or late afternoon.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bjorli|first=Trond Erik|title=Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahns Archives of the Planet|last2=Jakobsen|first2=Kjetil Ansgar|publisher=Intellect Books|year=2020|isbn=|editor-last=|editor-first=|location=|pages=}}</ref>
{{quote|“not limit [the autochrome plate] to producing dazzling tones, let us also turn our eyes to the master landscapists: the Cazins, the Monets, the divine Corot […] Let us be inspired by their examples by seeking to translate the the softest and most delicate colours in nature, and in this way we will make a work of art."<ref name=":2" />}} He also observed that; {{quote|"the Autochrome plate sees...with the precursor eye [of the] valiant Impressionists."<ref>Nathalie Boulouch, 'Edmond Becquerel, la photographie des couleurs et le paradigme de la rétine,' in proceedings of the conference ''Edmond Becquerel et la naissance de la photographie couleur'', Thursday 10 December 2015, organised by the Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation and sponsored by COMUE Sorbonne-Universités, at the [[National Museum of Natural History, France|Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle]]</ref> }}To overcome the limited exposure latitude of the medium, he acheived saturated colour in both subjects and background sky (which normally overexposed) by shooting with the sun directly on his subject, angled obliquely as it is in early morning or late afternoon.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Bjorli|first=Trond Erik|title=Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahns Archives of the Planet|last2=Jakobsen|first2=Kjetil Ansgar|publisher=Intellect Books|year=2020|isbn=|editor-last=|editor-first=|location=|pages=}}</ref><ref name=":3">Nathalie Boulouch, « Le miracle des couleurs », in Les couleurs du voyage. L’oeuvre photographique de Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, ed. Béatrice de Pastre, and Emmanuelle Devos, Paris: Paris Musées: Phileas Fogg, 2002, 51 {{quote|Il est vrai que Personnaz, qui tentera de définir une pratique de l’autochromie artistique, place parmi les sujets à privilégier part tout photographe “artiste”, les vues de paysages sous des atmosphères lumineuses avoisinant le lever ou le coucher de soleil.}}</ref>


=== Writings on photography ===
=== Writings on photography ===

Revision as of 12:06, 12 August 2020

Antonin Personnaz was a French art collector and early colour photographer.

Early life

Antonin Personnaz was born in 1854 in Bayonne into a wealthy family of fabric exporters with Savoyard origins, from the commune of Bessans. He attended primary school there and died in the same town on 31 December 1936 [1].

Art collector

Personnaz was great lover of art and a friend and patron of painters. In 1878 Personnaz moved to 4 rue Sainte-Cecile, Paris, working as a partner in the family business. Interested in art, he had started collecting antique works in 1875 and in 1879 concentrated on paintings and drawings.[2] In 1880 he purchased an Ironers by Edgar Degas and paintings by Albert Lebourg, Jean-François Raffaelli, and Camille Pissarro whom he befriended and through him met other Impressionists and over 1892-1893 visited the collections of Georges Murat, Eugène Murer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Paul Gallimard, Eugène Blot and Jean-Baptiste Faure, who were all buying Impressionist art.[3] Like them he began to purchase works from his most innovative contemporaries, along with old masters like Franz Hals. In 1906 he acquired Le Pont d'Argenteuil by Claude Monet. With his friend Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat whom Personnaz' father supported in starting his painting career, he was behind the creation of the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne.[4]

Photographer

In 1896, on return from a business trip to Florence, Personnaz encountered the work of French photographer Constant Puyo, whom he acclaimed as the 'Botticelli of photography', and whose work inspired his interest in the emerging Pictorialist style. That year he became a member of the Société française de photographie,[4] where he held the post of assistant secretary and then secretary general from 1911 to 1919 and in 1900 he joined the Société d’excursion des amateurs de photographie, an excursion group for amateur photographers and exhibited in the French photography section of the Exposition Universelle (1900). In 1903 he won First Prize for his picture A-B-C in a contest held by the Revue de Photographie, and a medal at Le Havre for his stereoscopic views. The same year he photographed Pissarro in his studio which he exhibited at the Salon du Photo-Club de Paris held annually at the Georges Petit gallery and at the Durand-Ruel gallery,[3] in which he exhibited for a number of years, and began writing articles of criticism and on art processes in photography. His successes continued, with First Prize in the Third Concourse of the Revue de Photographie in 1904.

'Impressionist' photography

From 1906, Personnaz practiced the colour Autochrome process invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière. He first exhibited such pictures, made in Madrid, by projection at the S.F.P. that year (the process produced transparencies, not prints). Overall he produced more than a thousand plates in that medium, the grainy and pointillist rendering of which lends it an Impressionist quality.[5][6][7] Such aesthetic qualities he ardently defended, and emphasised in making pictures at sites and of subjects depicted by the painters;[8] rural landscapes and peasant scenes, haystacks, river views, women with umbrellas, flowering apple trees, fields strewn with poppies and the painters themselves at work.[9] He urged other photographers to;

“not limit [the autochrome plate] to producing dazzling tones, let us also turn our eyes to the master landscapists: the Cazins, the Monets, the divine Corot […] Let us be inspired by their examples by seeking to translate the the softest and most delicate colours in nature, and in this way we will make a work of art."[5]

He also observed that;

"the Autochrome plate sees...with the precursor eye [of the] valiant Impressionists."[10]

To overcome the limited exposure latitude of the medium, he acheived saturated colour in both subjects and background sky (which normally overexposed) by shooting with the sun directly on his subject, angled obliquely as it is in early morning or late afternoon.[11][8]

Writings on photography

Personnaz wrote several articles on the Autochrome process. Several showings of his photographs were held at the SPF and he published several articles in the society's review, and his maritime picture was the frontispiece of the Annuaire General et International de la Photographie 1907 accompanied by his romantic story The Vocation of Chanikoff, based on it.[12] His writings discuss the relationship between painting and photography and he gave lectures on the same theme in France and abroad, and presented the conference Concerning Art Processes in Photography in 1907. In 1910 he wrote on the impressionistic effects of Autochrome.

Later life and legacy

Personnaz retired in 1919 to 22 rue Lormand in Bayonne where he continued his association with learned societies and devoted himself to the development of the Bonnat museum, and on the death of Léon Bonnat, wrote tributes to him and literature on his art. In 1931 he loaned Le Pont d'Argenteuil to the Claude Monet retrospective at the Orangerie des Tuileries.[13]

On his death after an illness on 31 December 1936, his widow, Clémentine (née Clémentine Pauline Simon, whom he married in 1915), delivered a legacy of 142 works to the national museums, including first-rate, mainly Impressionist works by Pissarro, Guillaumin, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, which are held at the Musée d’Orsay and at the Musée Bonnat-Helleu. She donated a large collection of photographs and cameras to the Société française de photographie. In 1947 she made a further donation of 44 paintings to the Bonnat museum, under the control of the national museums. Since 1986 the Personnaz collection has been administered by the Musée d’Orsay. Of note is that his Claude Monet, Le Pont d'Argenteuil was damaged in an act of vandalism in 2007.[14]

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen dedicated an exhibition to him as part of the Normandy Impressionist Festival 2020.[15][3]

Publications

  • Personnaz, Antonin, Paris, H. Laurens, 1925
  • Personnaz, Antonin (1903) artlcle in Revue de Photographie
  • Personnaz, Antonin (1904) artlcle in Bulletin de S.F.P.
  • Personnaz, Antonin, (1905) artlcle in Revue de Photographie
  • Personnaz, Antonin, (1906) artlcle in Bulletin de S.F.P.
  • Personnaz, A., & Musée Bonnat. (1930). Catalogue sommaire: Antiquités égyptiennes, grecques et romaines, sculptures, tableaux et objets d'art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes.

Exhibitions

  • 1903: Salon Photo-Club, Paris
  • 1904: Salon Photo-Club, Paris
  • 1905: Salon Photo-Club, Paris
  • 1906: Salon Photo-Club, Paris
  • 1907: Salon Photo-Club, Paris
  • 1908: Salon Photo-Club, Paris
  • 1996/7: Work included in La couleur sensible: photographies autochromes, 1907-1935, Centre de la Vieille Charité, 19 December–16 February
  • 2020: Antonin Personnaz (1854-1936), Impressionist Photographer, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, 11 July - 15 November Impressionist Photographer11 July - 15 November

References

  1. ^ Jean Cuisenier, Destins objets , Volume 1 of Studies and works collection - Heritage School, Publisher Documentation française, 1988, ISBN 2110020091, 9782110020093 p. 139:

    When he died on December 31, 1936, his holograph left with a notary in Bayonne on February 3, 1937, directed: "I leave to my wife everything I own, apart from a few legacies indicated below
  2. ^ James, Anne Clark (June 1994). "Antonin Personnaz: Art collector and autochrome pioneer". History of Photography. 18 (2): 147–150. doi:10.1080/03087298.1994.10442343. ISSN 0308-7298.
  3. ^ a b c "Life in colour: Antonin Personnaz, impressionist photographer". Normandie Impressionniste (in French). 2020-02-12. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  4. ^ a b Auer, Michèle; Auer, Michel; Auer, Michèle. Encyclopédie internationale des photographes de 1839 à nos jours; Ides et calendes (Publishers) (1997), Encyclopédie internationale des photographes des débuts à nos jours = Photographers encyclopedia international from its beginnings to the present, Ides et calendes, ISBN 978-2-8258-0126-0{{citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ a b N. Boulouch, “Antonin Personnaz ou l’aventure d’un autochromiste”, Histoire de l’art, 13-14, 1991, p. 67-76.
  6. ^ Kalba, Laura Anne (2017-07-18). Color in the Age of Impressionism. Penn State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-07980-6.
  7. ^ Heilbrun, Françoise (February 2009). "Impressionism and Photography". History of Photography. 33 (1): 18–25. doi:10.1080/03087290802582889. ISSN 0308-7298.
  8. ^ a b Nathalie Boulouch, « Le miracle des couleurs », in Les couleurs du voyage. L’oeuvre photographique de Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, ed. Béatrice de Pastre, and Emmanuelle Devos, Paris: Paris Musées: Phileas Fogg, 2002, 51

    Il est vrai que Personnaz, qui tentera de définir une pratique de l’autochromie artistique, place parmi les sujets à privilégier part tout photographe “artiste”, les vues de paysages sous des atmosphères lumineuses avoisinant le lever ou le coucher de soleil.
  9. ^ "Life in Colors : Antonin Personnaz Impressionist Photographer". The Eye of Photography Magazine. 2020-08-11. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  10. ^ Nathalie Boulouch, 'Edmond Becquerel, la photographie des couleurs et le paradigme de la rétine,' in proceedings of the conference Edmond Becquerel et la naissance de la photographie couleur, Thursday 10 December 2015, organised by the Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation and sponsored by COMUE Sorbonne-Universités, at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
  11. ^ Bjorli, Trond Erik; Jakobsen, Kjetil Ansgar (2020). Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahns Archives of the Planet. Intellect Books.
  12. ^ "Annuaire général et international de la PHOTOGRAPHIE 1907". vialibriweb-legacy.28vn6n8gw6.us-east-2.elasticbeanstalk.com. Retrieved 2020-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  13. ^ Exhibition guide: Exposition Antonin Personnaz: La vie en couleurs 11.07-15.11 2020. Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen. 2020.
  14. ^ Kanter, James (2007-10-08). "Vandal Punches Hole in a Monet in Paris". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  15. ^ "Antonin Personnaz, un photographe parmi les impressionnistes". Beaux Arts (in French). Retrieved 2020-08-12.
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