Édouard Baldus

(b Gr?nebach, Westphalia, Prussia [now Germany], 5 June 1813; d Arcueil, 22 Dec 1889). French photographer and painter of German origin. He was originally a painter, and he took up photography c. 1848. Within the framework of the Mission H?liographique established by the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1851, he managed to establish himself as an architectural photographer. The Minist?re de l'Int?rieur ordered him to undertake a variety of projects, such as photographing construction work on the new Louvre (1854-69) and the Rh?ne floods (1856). Other commissions were the albums Chemin de fer du Nord: Ligne de Paris ? Boulogne (1855) and L'Album des chemins de fer de Paris ? Lyon et ? la M?diterran?e (1859; copies in Rochester, NY, Int. Mus. Phot.). From 1865 Baldus was content to exploit his stock of photographs.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Baldus, Édouard Denis (1813-89), French photographer. Initially a painter, but discovering his métier as a photographer of architectural views, Baldus also contributed to the technical development of the medium. He left his native Westphalia for Paris in 1838, but may already have worked successfully as a portrait painter in the USA; his first 25 years are a mystery.

Baldus showed his paintings at salons between 1841 and 1852, and had taken up photography by 1848. In 1851 he had joined the Société Héliographique, and worked for the Mission Héliographique in Burgundy, the Dauphiné, and the South of France, using the special waxed-paper negatives that he had patented. Mostly large scale, and sometimes printed from more than one negative, his pictures demonstrate his desire to create images of a commanding architectural presence, a constant feature of his work.

Following this success, Baldus successfully sought a subscription from the Interior Ministry for a series on Les Villes de France photographiées, and began to demonstrate his consummate skill at representing architectural form. His pictures of Paris monuments like the Louvre combine the subtle play of light across the building with stunning clarity of detail. Photographs made in central and southern France underlined his growing mastery of the medium.

In 1855 Baron James de Rothschild commissioned Baldus to create a huge album of views, bound in red leather, as a gift to celebrate the opening of the Boulogne-Paris railway by Queen Victoria. It is one of the masterpieces of early photography. Further state commissions followed, including in 1856 a series on the disastrous Rhône floods at Lyon, Avignon, and Tarascon. The Louvre's reconstruction between 1855 and 1858 was extensively documented by Baldus, and may constitute the apogee of his career. Two thousand negatives recorded the vast project ‘stone by stone’, as the critic Lacan wrote. Coverage of other railway and civil engineering projects followed, but by the mid-1860s Baldus had begun to devote himself to publishing photographic reproductions of art and architecture by the heliogravure process he had invented. The business flourished initially, but failed in 1887.

— Peter Hamilton

Bibliography

• Daniel, M., The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (1994)

Édouard-Denis Baldus (June 5, 1813, Grunebach, Prussia – 1889, Paris) was a French landscape, architectural and railway photographer.

Baldus was originally trained as a painter and had also worked as a draughtsman and lithographer before switching to photography in 1849. In 1851, he was commissioned for the Missions Héliographiques by the Historic Monuments Commission of France to photograph historic buildings, bridges and monuments, many of which were being razed to make way for the grand boulevards of Paris, being carried out under the direction of Napoleon III's prefect Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

The high quality of his work won him government support for a project entitled Les Villes de France Photographiées, an extended series of architectural views in Paris and the provinces designed to feed a resurgent interest in the nation's Roman and medieval past.

In 1855, Baron James de Rothschild, President of Chemin de Fer du Nord, commissioned Baldus to do a series of photographs to be used as part of an album that was to be a gift to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a souvenir of their visit to France that year. The lavishly bound album is still among the treasures of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

In 1856, Baldus set out on a brief assignment to photograph the destruction caused by torrential rains and overflowing rivers in Lyon, Avignon, and Tarascon. He created a moving record of the flood without explicitly depicting the human suffering left in its wake.

He was extremely well-known throughout France for his efforts in photography. One of his greatest assignments was to document the construction of the Louvre museum.

Baldus used wet and dry paper negatives as large as 10x14 inches in size. From these negatives, he made contact prints. In order to create a larger image, he put contact prints side by side to create a panoramic effect.

Baldus was renowned for the sheer size of his pictures, which ranged up to eight feet long for one panorama from around 1855, made from several negatives.

Despite the documentary nature of many of his assignments, Baldus was no purist when it came to technique. He often retouched his negatives to blank out buildings and trees, or to put clouds in white skies; in one print from 1851, he pieced together fragments of 10 different negatives to create a composite print of the medieval cloister of St. Trophime, in Arles.

Notable photographs

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Édouard Baldus

• The Photographs of Edouard Baldus article on his photographic style
• Some of Baldus's photographs
• Lee Gallery

References

• Daniel, Malcolm, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus, with an essay by Barry Bergdoll. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

This article about a photographer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)