1819-1882 · French

Alphonse Poitevin

Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882) is the French chemist and engineer who invented the gum bichromate process in 1855, alongside photolithography and the carbon process. Building on Mungo Ponton's 1839 discovery of dichromate photosensitivity, Poitevin applied this property to pigmented colloids — opening the era of pigment-based photographic processes.

Public domain since 1953 · CPI L.123-1

Held at

Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Société française de photographie
Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM)
George Eastman Museum, Rochester

Reference writings

Brevet du procédé pigmentaire (1855)
Traité de l'impression photographique sans sels d'argent (1862)

Louis-Alphonse Poitevin, engineer trained at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris (class of 1843), devoted his career to applying chemistry to photographic reproduction. Building on Mungo Ponton's 1839 discovery that potassium dichromate is photosensitive, Poitevin demonstrated in 1855 that this property extends to pigmented colloids — gum arabic, gelatin combined with carbon black — which become insoluble where exposed to light. That same year he filed his foundational patents on the gum bichromate process, the carbon process and photolithography, laying the foundation for the entire family of pigment-based alternative processes — gum bichromate, carbon transfer, bromoil, gumoil — that remained dominant for fine art photographic printing through the 20th century. In 1862 he published the Traité de l'impression photographique sans sels d'argent, a reference manual on pigment processes; he was also awarded the Duc de Luynes Prize for photolithography (exact amount not confirmed across sources). Named Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur on 24 January 1863, he was further distinguished at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878. After his industrial career in the salt works of Dieuze, Montmorot and Gouhenans and as manager of the Ahun-les-Mines and Folembray glassworks, Poitevin retired to Conflans-sur-Anille (Sarthe), where he served as mayor from 1871 to 1878. His original plates, patents, and reference albums are held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), the Musée d'Orsay and the Société française de photographie archives. Poitevin's patrimonial rights lapsed in France in 1953. At Maison Picturale, his historical reproductions and scientific plates can be reinterpreted as contemporary gum bichromate prints — a tribute to the inventor of the very process we now use without dichromate, thanks to Vision Picturale's reformulation.

Signature processes

The alternative processes practised by Alphonse Poitevin, printed today at Maison Picturale using Vision Picturale's non-toxic reformulated chemistry.

View process

Gomme bichromatée

Le procédé pictorialiste emblématique — la précision photographique au service de la matière

View process

Charbon

La matière noire

View process

Essential works

A curated selection of public-domain works by Alphonse Poitevin, reinterpretable as contemporary prints by Maison Picturale's master printers. Each artwork page details the original process and its atelier equivalent.

Print after — systematic mention on the certificate of authenticity.

c. 1860 · Photographic negative (Poitevin process)

L'Hôtel de Ville de Paris et le Pont d'Arcole

View of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris and the Pont d'Arcole, an architectural study from Poitevin's BnF archive that documents the city centre of Paris at the dawn of the Second Empire urban transformation. Louis-Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882), engineer of the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (class of 1843), is the chemist who in 1855 filed the three foundational patents that opened the pigment era of photography: gum bichromate, the carbon process and photolithography — each derived from his demonstration that potassium dichromate sensitises pigmented colloids such as gum arabic and gelatin combined with carbon black. In 1862 he was awarded the Duc de Luynes Prize by the Société française de photographie for his work on photolithography, and the same year published the Traité de l'impression photographique sans sels d'argent, the reference manual on silver-free pigment processes. This Paris view belongs to the corpus of architectural plates Poitevin built throughout the 1860s as test prints for his procédés, photographing monuments and provincial heritage from the salt works of Gouhenans (Haute-Saône) to the medieval keep of Mondoubleau. The Hôtel de Ville pictured here is the 16th-century Renaissance building burned during the Commune of 1871 — making the plate, today held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), a pre-fire document of major urban-history value. At Maison Picturale, an architectural study of this register can be reinterpreted as a contemporary gum bichromate print using the non-toxic Aquaprint reformulation developed by Vision Picturale — a direct homage to the inventor of the very process, now practised without dichromate salts.

Original held at : Bibliothèque nationale de France

Reference file source : Gallica BnF (Public Domain)

c. 1855 · Photographic negative (Poitevin process)

Courtyard of the Gouhenans Salt Works

Documentary view of the courtyard of the Gouhenans salt works in Haute-Saône, where Louis-Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882) served as engineering director from 1851 to 1855 — the very years preceding the three patents (gum bichromate, carbon process, photolithography) he filed in 1855 and that would found the entire family of pigment-based photographic processes. Poitevin's industrial trajectory ran in parallel to his photographic research: trained at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (Paris, class of 1843), he directed in succession the salt works of Dieuze, Montmorot and Gouhenans, then the Ahun-les-Mines and Folembray glassworks, before retiring to Conflans-sur-Anille (Sarthe) where he served as mayor from 1871 to 1878. This plate is therefore a rare biographical document, capturing the workplace where the chemist-engineer matured the colloid sensitisation experiments that culminated in his 1855 inventions, awarded with the Duc de Luynes Prize by the Société française de photographie in 1862. The Gouhenans complex itself was a major industrial site of mid-19th-century eastern France, exploiting salt from deep brine wells under the technical reorganisation that Poitevin oversaw, and is today held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica). The image stands as a rare convergence of his industrial and photographic careers — a witness of working architecture and worker presence at a moment when documentary photography of industry was still a marginal genre in 1850s France. At Maison Picturale, this register of industrial documentation can be reinterpreted as a carbon transfer print in the Noir Musée range (pigmented gelatin in deep blacks) or in the multi-pigment Couleur Profonde palette.

Original held at : Bibliothèque nationale de France

Reference file source : Gallica BnF (Public Domain)

c. 1855 · Photographic negative (Poitevin process)

General View of the Gouhenans Salt Works

Panoramic view of the industrial complex of the Gouhenans salt works in Haute-Saône, where Louis-Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882) served as engineering director from 1851 to 1855 — the very period during which he developed the colloid sensitisation experiments that led, in 1855, to his three foundational patents on gum bichromate, the carbon process and photolithography. Trained at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris (class of 1843), Poitevin pursued in parallel an industrial career (salt works of Dieuze, Montmorot, Gouhenans; glassworks of Ahun-les-Mines and Folembray) and a photographic research practice that earned him the Duc de Luynes Prize of the Société française de photographie in 1862 and made him Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur on 24 January 1863. This wide view, held today at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), is one of two surviving photographic plates by Poitevin documenting Gouhenans (alongside the courtyard view) — a self-portrait of the chemist's industrial environment at the exact threshold of his three inventions, and a rare specimen of 1850s industrial topography seen through the eyes of its director-engineer. The plate also belongs to the larger corpus of test prints Poitevin produced to characterise his procédés, photographing the locations and monuments he had access to during his industrial assignments and travels. At Maison Picturale, a panoramic industrial view of this nature can be reinterpreted as a contemporary carbon transfer print in the Noir Musée range (deep pigmented gelatin blacks) or as an Aquaprint gum bichromate using the non-toxic Vision Picturale reformulation — a direct homage to the inventor of the very process.

Original held at : Bibliothèque nationale de France

Reference file source : Gallica BnF (Public Domain)

1853 · Salted paper print

Self-Portrait

Early self-portrait by the inventor of the gum bichromate process — captured on salted paper just two years before his decisive 1855 patents on photolithography and carbon printing.

Original held at : Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Reference file source : LACMA / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

1842 · Daguerreotype (attributed)

The Pantheon (Daguerreotype)

Attributed early daguerreotype of the Panthéon in Paris, dated 1842 and held by the J. Paul Getty Museum — one of the earliest known photographic works by Louis-Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882), made when he was still a 23-year-old engineering student at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris (class of 1843). The plate precedes by more than a decade the three patents that would make Poitevin's name in the history of photography: gum bichromate, the carbon process and photolithography, all filed in 1855 after his demonstration that potassium dichromate sensitises pigmented colloids — the foundational discovery on which the entire family of pigment-based alternative processes rests. Mercury-vapour daguerreotype, invented and published in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, was still the dominant photographic technique when Poitevin made this image — only three years after the public release of the process. The choice of subject — the Panthéon of Paris, Soufflot's 18th-century neoclassical mausoleum of the great men of the Republic — is consistent with the early daguerreotypists' taste for monumental architecture, whose immobility tolerated long exposures of several minutes in bright daylight. The plate documents the photographic apprenticeship of a future inventor and chemist, before he reoriented the medium toward silver-free pigment printing. Direct mercury-vapour daguerreotype is not part of Maison Picturale's craft — but Poitevin's later procédés are, and an architectural Parisian study of this register can be reinterpreted as a contemporary carbon transfer in the Noir Musée range or as an Aquaprint gum bichromate, following the non-toxic Vision Picturale reformulation.

Original held at : J. Paul Getty Museum

Reference file source : Getty / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

1883 · Reproduction (Bulletin SFP)

Posthumous Portrait of Alphonse Poitevin

Posthumous tribute portrait of Louis-Alphonse Poitevin (1819-1882) published in the Bulletin de la Société française de photographie in 1883, one year after his death — a printed homage by the institution that had awarded him its Duc de Luynes Prize in 1862 for his work on photolithography, and that conserves in its archives many of his foundational documents. The Société française de photographie, founded in Paris on 15 November 1854, was throughout the second half of the 19th century the leading learned society of photographic research in France and the body before which Poitevin had presented, in 1855, the experiments establishing the photosensitivity of pigmented colloids — the discovery from which sprang his three patents on gum bichromate, the carbon process and photolithography, all filed the same year. The Bulletin de la SFP, published continuously from 1855 onward, served both as scientific journal and as obituarist for the founders of the medium. This 1883 plate, today freely available on Wikimedia Commons from the Bulletin scans, fixes the canonical image of Poitevin transmitted by the photographic community of his time: chemist of the École Centrale (class of 1843), industrial director of the salt works of Dieuze, Montmorot and Gouhenans, mayor of Conflans-sur-Anille (1871-1878), Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (24 January 1863). As a posthumous reproduction in a learned journal, the work does not lend itself to a direct Maison Picturale process transposition, but stands as a historical and biographical reference plate, free of copyright since 1953, accompanying the studio's interpretations of Poitevin's other plates and photolithographs.

Original held at : Société française de photographie

Reference file source : Bulletin SFP 1883 / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

c. 1855-1860 · Photolithograph (Lithophotog. Lemercier / P. Poitevin process)

Tomb of Philippe Pot, Dijon (Photolithograph)

Photolithograph reproducing the funerary sculpture of Philippe Pot (1428-1494) — a historically significant specimen of Poitevin's photolithography process produced in partnership with printer Joseph-Rosé Lemercier and publisher A.F. Lemaitre.

Original held at : Rijksmuseum

Reference file source : Rijksmuseum RP-F-1996-3 / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

The documented corpus

The rest of Alphonse Poitevin's public-domain corpus: plates kept in our editorial archives. Reproducible on request, without dedicated editorial study.

5 archived plates