Édouard Baldus 1813-1889

William L. Schaeffer/Photographs, Connecticut

Acquired by Weston Gallery, Carmel, from the above, 1985

Acquired by the Southland Corporation from the above

Sotheby's New York, Photographs from the Collection of 7-Eleven, Inc., 5 and 6 April 2000, Sale 7448, Lot 113

Acquired by Margaret W. Weston from the above

Monterey Museum of Art, Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston, January - April 2003

The image offered here shows Edouard Baldus's mastery of the photographic medium, both in his vision of the subject depicted and the technical skills necessary to achieve it.  The Cloisters at St. Trophime presented special problems for a 19^th- century photographer, with the angled perspective of the long gallery, its dark shadows, and the bright sunlight.  For an earlier photograph of these same Cloisters, taken in 1851, Baldus had met the challenge by combining parts of no less than 10 paper negatives, each exposed separately, which he then joined at strategic points of the Cloisters' architecture to effectively hide the seams.   

The image of the Cloisters offered here, produced 10 years later, shows Baldus's skillful control of a later photographic process, in this instance, a contact print made from a large glass-plate negative.  According to Baldus authority Malcolm Daniel, the photographer may have manipulated the single glass negative during the printing process itself.  When one closely examines the print, evidence of soft details, not always common with glass negatives, tend to emerge at different points in the image.  It is possible that Baldus used thin transparent tissue paper to mask certain areas of the glass negative and to create a wide variety of tones, essentially dodging the areas of the print that he felt were too visually imposing.  Baldus then further manipulated the photograph itself by using light washes that are apparent on the print's surface.  As with the earlier St. Trophime image, the photographer reached far beyond the confines of his negative to produce the desired result.

For other Baldus studies of the Cloisters of St. Trophime, see Malcolm Daniel, The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (New York, 1994), fig. 3 and pls. 1 and 80.