Through the acquisition of personal archives such as that of René Huyghe, a small collection of photographs of artists in both formal and studio settings has been established. The department’s album holdings complement the photographs of artists with the Galerie Contemporaine Artistique and Galerie Contemporaine des Illustrations Françaises, two multivolume nineteenth-century publications that include photographs of French artists. Many of the department’s collection of catalogues of the French Salons feature portraits of artists and their submission to the Salon for that year.
Photographs of Artists
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
(1824–1898)
Diego Rivera at the New Worker's School, New York, silver gelatin print, 1933. Photograph © Lucienne Bloch
Most of these photographs were taken by anonymous photographers, but there are some examples in which both the sitter and the portraitist are known, such as Paul Nadar's portrait of Claude Monet or Lucienne Bloch's image of Diego Rivera, who is shown painting at the New Worker's School in New York.
In recent years, the department of image collections has begun to collect actively in this area, especially in the area of photographs of contemporary artists. Paul Katz donated his photographs documenting members of the New York art world from the 1960s to the 1980s that include views of artist in the process of creating a work of art as well as more formal portraits of artists in the studio.
Daniel Chester French (center) in his studio at 114 West 18th Street, New York, with a model of the Gallaudet Memorial, a child, an assistant, and a sculpture of a nude woman, albumen print, c. 1889
Other notable examples of artists included in this collection are
Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875)
Daniel Chester French (1850–1931)
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
Sam Gilliam (b. 1933)
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867)
Alfred Jensen (1903-1981)
Jasper Johns (b. 1930)
Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (1820–1910)
Alice Neel (1900-1984)
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)
John Ruskin (1819–1900)
Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923)
James Van Der Zee (1886-1983)
left: Henri Matisse sketching Henriette Darricarrère in his apartment, silver gelatin print, mid-1920s right: Anonymous French photographer. Portrait of Rosa Bonheur by Edouard Dubufe. Ambrotype, c. 1857.
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