The Ladder

THE LADDER

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HENRI-VICTOR REGNAULT

Genre: Still Life

Date: 1852

Location: Sèvres, France

Format: Salt print

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“Henri-Victor Regnault (1810-78) is one of the most significant figures in early French photography. A founding member of the Société héliographies in 1851, he was also the founding president of the Société Française de Photographie in 1854.

Regnault occupies an important – indeed unique – position in that his interests spanned the diverse but overlapped fields of science, industry, photography and art. He was one the first in France to use William Henry Fox Talbot’s paper negative, or calotype, process. In 1843, Regnault met Fox Talbot when the latter visited Paris.

A distinguished chemist, professor of physics and member of the French Académie des Sciences, in 1852 Regnault was appointed director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, where he established a photography department. Regnault also had a keen artistic sensibility. In his time off from official duties, he took a series of photographs in the grounds of the Sèvres factory. The Ladder was taken in a quiet corner of the works, between the stables and the porter’s lodge. A carefully arranged collection of rustic objects created a picturesque composition. The scene is divided vertically into two balanced halves of light and shadow. The varied textures of the objects and the rough plaster wall are echoed in the surface texture of the paper in which the photograph is printed.

Furthermore, it is surely more than just coincidental that the photograph’s motif of a still life of rustic objects is very like the painted scenes of some of the finest 18th-century Sèvres porcelain – pieces with which Regnault would naturally have been intimately familiar.”(CH)

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