Charles Marville

(b Paris, 18 July 1816; d between Jan 1878 and 20 Sept 1879). French photographer and illustrator. He first worked as an illustrator in the medium of wood-engraving and was associated with Tony Johannot. With the writer Charles Nodier (1780-1844) and publishers such as Curmer and Bourdin he took part in the creation of great Romantic illustrated editions of such works as Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. He was, however, primarily a landscape artist known as an illustrator of travel books. By 1851 he had become a photographer, concentrating on religious sites and religious architecture, particularly for Louis-D?sir? Blanquart-Evrard, who published c. 100 of his calotypes. He worked for the Louvre and reproduced drawings by major French and Italian artists. Collaborating with architects such as Paul Abadie, he photographed the different stages of construction or of restoration of civil and religious monuments. He also photographed the new Bois de Boulogne.

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Marville, Charles (1816-1878/9?), French photographer, forever associated with Baron Haussmann's transformation of Paris between 1865 and 1878, for he was the official photographer of the Ville de Paris from 1858 until the end of his life. Initially trained as an artist-engraver, he experienced early success during the brief vogue for illustrated storybooks of the 1830s. However, by the 1850s he had taken up photography, becoming a master of the calotype process and acquiring the position of official photographer to the Louvre in 1851, for which he reproduced many works of art. He also took numerous pictures for Blanquart-Évrard's photographic publications (1851-4) before becoming an architectural photographer, noted for his photographs of French and German medieval buildings.

From 1858, now using the wet-plate process, and with a unique sense of space and form, Marville photographed Haussmann's new constructions. They include the great public gardens of Boulogne and Vincennes, the new squares, and the street furniture introduced to make the city more modern, cleaner, and safer. In 1865 he was asked to photograph the oldest streets due for demolition, a magisterial record of 425 views on mammoth plates of 51 × 60.8 cm (20 × 24 in) for the most part that is widely seen as his masterwork.

Marville's oeuvre, completed by a series of views of the main boulevards of the city after their transformation in 1877, remains one of the great projects of 19th-century photography, not simply for the wonderful grasp of light and composition it demonstrates, but for the richness of detail that makes his pictures extraordinary documents of social history.

— Peter Hamilton

Bibliography

• Charles Marville: Photographs of Paris at the Time of the Second Empire on Loan from the Musée Carnavalet (1981)

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