Hôtel de Ville, Paris

Marville photographs the Hôtel de Ville on the place de Grève during the last decade of its Renaissance state — built progressively between 1533 and 1628 under François I and Henri IV, then enlarged in 1837-1846 by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde and Jean-Baptiste-Cicéron Lesueur — before its destruction by fire during the Paris Commune of 23-24 May 1871. Charles-François Bossu — known as Charles Marville — makes the view as photographer to the City of Paris (officially confirmed 1862), under the documentary mandate granted by Baron Haussmann's Préfecture de la Seine. The image is editorially inseparable from his post-Commune view of the ruins: the pair forms the canonical before/after diptych of 19th-century Parisian iconography, reproduced in the catalogues of the Musée Carnavalet's "Paris 1871" exhibitions and in Sarah Kennel's National Gallery monograph ("Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris", Washington, 2013), as well as in Maria Morris Hambourg's Marville texts for the Metropolitan Museum. Marville exposes a 30×40 wet-collodion glass negative on the place de Grève at dawn for the long pose; the orthochromatic emulsion does not register blue light and the sky is retouched by brush on the negative — the source of Marville's distinctive luminous white skies on every monumental architectural view of his Paris corpus. Held at George Eastman Museum, Musée Carnavalet, BHVP, Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Metropolitan Museum (Gilman Collection). Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: for this monumental architectural subject, platinum-palladium grand-format is the natural restitution, exploiting the matte tonal density and chemical permanence of the platinum process for a museum-grade reproduction; Vandyke — non-toxic ferric ammonium citrate and silver, reformulated salted paper — covers the modular fine-print scale.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / George Eastman Museum / Google Art Project