Pierre Dubreuil

oil print, the photographer's monogram on the image, dated '21 Mars' and annotated in pencil on the reverse, on a sextuple paper mount, 1908

Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Pierre Dubreuil Photographs 1896-1935, 1987

San Diego, The Museum of Photographic Arts, Pierre Dubreuil Rediscovered, 1988, and traveling thereafter to:

New York, Alliance Française, 1989

The Detroit Institute of the Arts, 1990

Pierre Dubreuil, Photographs 1896-1935 (San Diego, 1987, in conjunction with the exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou), fig. 8 and pl. 5 (this print)

Pierre Dubreuil, 'The Salon of the Photo-Club de Paris,' The Amateur Photographer & Photographic News, May 1909, Vol. XLIX, No. 1286, p. 498

Cyrille Ménard, 'Les Mâitres de la Photographie,' Photo Magazine, 1912, No. 18, p. 157

This robust oil print, with lush blacks, bright and creamy highlights, and an impressive range of grays, is in generally excellent condition. Upon very close examination, a faint 2-1/2 inch diagonal crease is visible in the lower left corner of the photograph. This print is trimmed to the image, and the lower-left edge of the print is bumped very slightly. This photograph is on 6 paper mounts. The reverse of the photograph is tipped along the upper edge and lower left corner to a brown paper mount, which is in turn tipped again to 4 similarly-sized brown, tan, and grey paper mounts. The 6th mount is a large sheet of textured, cream-colored paper, which is watermarked 'Lalanne.' Faint soiling, minor foxing, and age-darkening at the edges of the last mount are visible. The reverse of the print is annotated by the photographer in pencil: '21.30-55'; '21 Mars'; and 'St. Clair' [this is somewhat illegible].
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Notre Dame de Paris was amongst Dubreuil’s most celebrated and frequently exhibited photographs during his lifetime.  It was featured in 1908 at the London Salon and at Le Salon International du Photo-Club de Paris, important exhibitions of the period.  It was one of six Dubreuil photographs selected by Alfred Stieglitz for the Open Section of the seminal 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, where it was shown alongside Elephantesia, Steam – Gare du Nord, and other key images from Dubreuil’s Paris period.  Notre Dame de Paris was one of the 64 photographs included in Dubreuil’s first one-man exhibition in 1912 at the Little Gallery of the Amateur Photographer Magazine in London, and it received a full-page illustration that year in Cyrille Ménard’s thirty-six page article on the photographer in Photo-Magazine. 

It is believed that the photograph offered here is the only surviving oil print of this image.  A print sent in 1912 to Stieglitz for his personal collection was subsequently lost and has not resurfaced.   The only other known example of this image is a gelatin silver print made in the 1930s.  Although Dubreuil exhibited widely during his lifetime, there are few of his photographs extant.  Concerned for the safety of his life’s work, and experiencing financial difficulties on the eve of the second World War, Dubreuil sold his negatives and many of his prints to the Gevaert photographic company in Belgium.  When the factory was bombed during the war, most of Dubreuil’s oeuvre was destroyed. 

In Notre Dame de Paris, Dubreuil has seamlessly fused two negatives – the chestnut tree leaves in the foreground and Notre Dame along the banks of the Seine in the background – to create a sense of three-dimensional space.  With its lush blacks, bright highlights, and impressive range of charcoal-like gray tones, this print of Notre Dame de Paris demonstrates Dubreuil’s technical mastery of his medium.  

Dubreuil authority Tom Jacobson, from whose collection this photograph comes, recovered the work of this pioneering photographer in the 1980s.  Jacobson brought this long-forgotten work to public attention through the international exhibition, Pierre Dubreuil, Photographs 1896-1935, and its accompanying catalogue, which remains the definitive text on Dubreuil.  Of Notre Dame de Paris, Jacobson notes that the outline of the chestnut leaves in the image echoes the shape of the individual panes of Notre Dame’s South Rose Window.