Boulevard Saint-Michel, from Fontaine Saint-Michel

Marville composes the new Boulevard Saint-Michel from the Fontaine Saint-Michel, the 1858-1860 monumental fountain by Gabriel Davioud that anchors the boulevard's northern terminus on the Place Saint-André-des-Arts. The vanishing point of the boulevard, opened between 1855 and 1869 through the dense medieval fabric of the Quartier latin, converges with the perspective of the lens, producing the most legible image of the Haussmannian percée in the Marville corpus. Charles-François Bossu — known as Charles Marville — makes the view in his role as photographer to the City of Paris (officially confirmed 1862), under the salvage and documentary mandate granted by Baron Haussmann's Préfecture de la Seine. The image belongs to the corpus of approximately 425 Vieux Paris and Haussmann-era views Marville produced between 1862 and 1875, and is reproduced in Sarah Kennel's monograph for the National Gallery of Art ("Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris", Washington, 2013) and in Maria Morris Hambourg's Marville texts for the Metropolitan Museum. Marville uses an 18×24 or 30×40 wet-collodion glass negative, exposed at dawn for a long pose; the orthochromatic emulsion is blind to blue light and the sky is brush-retouched on the negative, the source of Marville's distinctive luminous white skies on every Haussmann boulevard view. Held at State Library of Victoria (Melbourne), the Musée Carnavalet, the BHVP, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Metropolitan Museum (Gilman Collection). Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: the original albumen on salted paper translates into Vandyke — non-toxic ferric ammonium citrate and silver, reformulated salted paper — for the fine-print scale, or into platinum-palladium grand-format to restitute the monumental tonal arc from fountain shadow to deep boulevard recession.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / State Library of Victoria