Gertrude Käsebier

platinum print, inscribed 'This print was given [to] me by Mrs. Turner (Mrs. Käsebier's daughter)' and signed by Consuelo Kanaga in pencil and annotated with the sitters' names in an unidentified hand in ink on the reverse, matted, framed, circa 1902

Other prints of this image, all vertical variants:

Camera Work Number 1 (New York, 1903), p. 27

Barbara L. Michaels, Gertrude Käsebier: The Photographer and Her Photographs (New York, 1992), pl. 59

William Innes Homer, A Pictorial Heritage: The Photographs of Gertrude Käsebier (Delaware Art Museum, 1979, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 30

William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (Boston, 1983), fig. 24

William Innes Homer and Catherine Johnson, Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession 1902 (New York, 2002), unpaginated

This warm-toned platinum print has rich charcoal-like dark tones and light-cream-colored highlights. It is essentially in excellent condition. When the print is examined very closely in raking light, a faint 2 ¼ -inch crease is visible in upper right corner. This has been skillfully reinforced on the reverse with the application of a thin layer of tissue. There are smaller, less visible creases in the lower left and right corners. There is minor wear on the edges, and the corners are somewhat rounded. None of these condition issues detracts in a serious way from the lovely appearance of this print. While the faint repetitive linear pattern visible on the image suggests that it was printed on laid paper, close examination reveals that the pattern was achieved photographically during the printing process. The two dark vertical lines visible on either side of the image are also photographic in nature, and may possibly be the result of light acting upon the edges of the sheet of glass laid over the negative and the platinum paper during exposure. On the reverse of the photograph, in the upper left corner, is the remnant of a small piece of cellotape.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Taken during Gertrude Käsebier's European trip of 1901, Serbonne shows the artist Frances Delehanty, the art student Charlotte Smith, and Käsebier's daughter Hermine seated on the grass, while the young Edward Steichen stands to the left.   Käsebier authority Barbara L. Michaels has noted the composition's debt to French nineteenth-century painting: '. . .  Serbonne may have been a playful variation on familiar paintings: Manet's Le déjeuner sur'herbe and/or the Concert champêtre in the Louvre . . . In Serbonne, the three women are seated in a glade, deployed like the three seated figures in the Manet and the Titian.  Steichen, standing on the left, replaces the standing figure in the Titian' (Gertrude Käsebier: The Photographer and Her Photographs, p. 84).  Michaels points out that both Käsebier and Steichen would have seen the Titian, then attributed to Giorgione, in the Louvre, and that Käsebier would have known through reproductions the sensational Manet, which Steichen had viewed first-hand at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Serbonne is one of a number of photographs that chronicle the early days of a decades-long friendship between Käsebier and Steichen, which began with Käsebier's arrival in France in 1901.  Steichen had come to Paris the year before to establish himself as a painter; Käsebier, who knew his photographs from one of the Philadelphia photographic salons, was traveling to Europe in 1901 with her daughter Hermine, and acting as chaperone to the young American Charlotte Smith and her sister Clara, who would later become Steichen's first wife.   The summer was filled with excursions, picnics, visits to museums, and drawing and photographing sessions.  In August, Käsebier wrote back to Alfred Stieglitz in New York that they were all having a 'double superlative time in Paris . . . with Steichen every day and how I have enjoyed him.  He is a corker!' (quoted in Michaels, p. 83).  A comical photograph of the group on one of their picnics was offered in these rooms in October of 2002 (Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art, 22 and 23 October 2002, Sale 7851, Lot 35).

Michaels points out that the photograph was made in the village of Serbonnes, southeast of Fontainebleau, the legendary 19^th-century destination for artists.  Michaels notes that the image was included in a number of important exhibitions in the photographer's lifetime, among them ones at the National Arts Club in 1902 and 1909, the Photo-Secession exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1906, the landmark International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1910, and in Käsebier's 1929 retrospective at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science, where it was alternately titled Serbonne (A Day in France).  The image is typically known in vertical format, having been reproduced with vertical cropping in Camera Work Number 1, 1904.

At the time of this writing, five prints of this image have been located in institutional collections, all in vertical formats: a platinum print in the George Eastman House; gum-bichromate prints in The Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the National Gallery of Art, Ottawa; and a gum-dichromate print in the Levy Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.  No other prints have been located that conform to the present print's horizontal format, which echoes most closely the image's compositional antecedents in the Titian and Manet paintings.   In an installation photograph of the inaugural exhibition of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1906, published in Camera Work Number 14, what appears to be the horizontal version of Serbonne can be seen on one wall (reproduced in Robert Doty, Photo-Secession, p. 39). 

The Serbonne offered here was given originally by Käsebier's daughter Hermine Turner to the photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894 – 1978) and is inscribed by Kanaga on the reverse.   Although best-known as an early member of the Group f.64, Kanaga began her career as an admirer of Pictorialism, and credits her exposure to Camera Work with her inspiration to become a photographer.