Study of Dahlias in a Wreath

Dahlias arranged in a decorative wreath formation (36.5 × 44.7 cm), drawn from the album « Fleurs Photographiées » (1854-1855) by Jean Adolphe Braun (1812-1877), the Alsatian photographer-industrialist who founded the Braun studio at Dornach. The album of three hundred floral plates was conceived as a commercial pattern book for painters, embroiderers and the Lyon silk industry, and won a first-class medal at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, securing Braun's election to the Société française de photographie in 1857. The wreath composition deliberately translates the seventeenth-century Flemish floral garland into photography: a continuous decorative band designed to be cut and re-used as ornamental motifs. The album's commercial success funded Braun's industrial pivot to the carbon transfer process (Swan licence, 1864), of which Braun was the first European industrialiser, eventually staffing the Dornach ateliers with up to 200 employees and supplying carbon reproductions to the Louvre, the Vatican and the British Museum. The principal Braun archive is held at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar; further holdings are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Library of Congress and the George Eastman Museum. Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: the wreath is reinterpreted as a direct-monochrome charbon print using the non-toxic chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, with pigmented gelatin in Noir Musée or Couleur Profonde tissues transferred onto 640 g/m² cotton paper — a faithful contemporary equivalent of the carbon transfer Braun industrialised, preserving the dense blacks and decorative legibility of the original while removing the dichromate hazards of the Swan-Braun workflow.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons