Shelling Beans, Argentelle
Humbert de Molard, freed from financial concerns by the wealth of his landholdings in Normandy and perhaps missing the activity of Paris as he settled in the provincial town of Lagny, took up photography in 1843, just four years after its invention. A clever chemist and skilled craftsman, he quickly mastered the new medium of daguerreotypy and experimented with paper photography by the late 1840s.
Clearly attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and its early nineteenth-century French revival, the wealthy baron and gentleman farmer Humbert de Molard posed his caretaker Louis Dodier (standing in elegant contrapposto, wearing wooden clogs) and other workers in a tableau of rural activity at his château at Argentelle, in Normandy.
Clearly attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and its early nineteenth-century French revival, the wealthy baron and gentleman farmer Humbert de Molard posed his caretaker Louis Dodier (standing in elegant contrapposto, wearing wooden clogs) and other workers in a tableau of rural activity at his château at Argentelle, in Normandy.
Artwork Details
- Title: Shelling Beans, Argentelle
- Artist: Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard (French, Paris 1800–1874)
- Date: 1851
- Medium: Salted paper print from paper negative
- Dimensions: Image: 22.3 x 17.7 cm (8 3/4 x 6 15/16 in.)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis Gift, 2005
- Object Number: 2005.100.263
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard
1840s
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ca. 1845
Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard
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