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Hippolyte Bayard (January 20, 1801 - May 14, 1887)
Hippolyte Bayard
(January 20, 1801 - May 14, 1887) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Hippolyte Bayard |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Breteuil-sur-Noye, Oise |
| Nationality: |
French |
| Birth: |
January 20, 1801 |
| Death: |
May 14, 1887 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
Photographer |
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Biography
| His invention in early 1839 of direct positive photography on paper, by using silver chloride and potassium iodide, upon which light acted as a bleach, was totally original. It differed from the daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre in producing a positive image on paper rather than on a metal plate, and it differed from the invention of William Henry Fox Talbot in that it produced a positive image without the use of a negative. Bayards images were sharper than Talbots, but because of their paper support they still lacked the fine detail of the daguerreotype. Unable to secure the influential patronage of the scientist and politician Francois Arago, who was backing Daguerre, Bayard undertook to promote his own invention, with remarkable success. In July 1839‚¯one month before the daguerreotype process was publically divulgeda‚¯Bayard showed his photographs in a benefit art exhibition in Paris and gained favourable reviews. This was the first public exhibition of photographs. By October he had won the support of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, who published an enthusiastic report. Bayard was unable, however, to secure government recognition in the form of an award. He never published a full description of his method, and it was not widely known. Thus it did not have the great popular success of the daguerreotype. Bayard satirized his condition as the neglected genius in his well-known Self-portrait as a Drowned Man.(1840) Nonetheless, there was a demand in France for a workable paper process. Bayards invention continued to interest those who understood the advantages of photography on paper until Talbots calotype process became established in France.Bayard himself learnt the calotype method as early as 1842. By the autumn of 1845 he was having great success with a modified calotype technique and undoubtedly abandoned his own process around this time. Of the many calotypes he produced, images of the making of modern Paris predominate. His views of Les Batignolles and Montmartre concentrate on construction and change, as in Excavation for Rue Tholoze (1843), where the romantic windmills of Montmartre are juxtaposed with the cutting for new streets. Images of the city itself favour the newly completed monuments west of the Louvre such as the Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine. This work is often signed and dated and was sold by print merchants as early as 1845. He also produced a significant number of calotype genre scenes and portraits. His many still-lifes and self-portraits often reflected his passion for gardening (e.g. Self-portrait: the Garden in Winter, c. 1847; Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.). His calotype production ended by 1849 when he converted to glass negative photography.Bayard played a pioneering role in defining the importance of architectural photography. The architect Felix-Jacques Duban based his drawings of his restoration of the chateau de Blois on daguerreotypes by Bayard, commissioned in 1843. This undoubtedly influenced the Commission des Monuments Historiques to hire Bayard to photograph some monuments for them in 1849 and to establish, by 1851, the Mission Heliographique to photograph the major architectural monuments of France. Bayard was also among the first to distinguish himself in the photographic reproduction of works of art. The painter Jules Claude Ziegler, in preparing his treatise on colour and light, consulted Bayard on the sensitivity of photographic emulsions to various colours.From the early 1850s Bayard participated in the industrial and commercial growth of photography, and his technical innovations became part of the first successful methods for the mass production of positive prints. He was associated with the illustrator Bertall in a carte-de-visite portrait business from 1860 to 1866. He exhibited regularly in all important photography exhibitions. In 1863 he received the cross of the Legion dhonneur for his contributions to photography. He was a founder-member of the Societe Heliographique in 1851 and, in 1854, of the Societe Francaise de Photographie. On his retirement from the latter, in 1881, he donated some of his direct positive photographs and some of Talbots early experiments to the new photography museum of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris. |
Samples of Work
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