Nude with Baby

Madonna-and-child themed figure study from 1909: a seated nude female figure cradles an infant against an interior backdrop, the entire scene drenched in the oblique soft light that defines White's Newark-trained pictorialism. The work belongs to the small corpus of allegorical nudes White produced after his move to New York in 1906, alongside the slightly later Pipes of Pan (1909), and demonstrates his fluency with the gum-platinum combination process — a multi-layer technique in which a platinum print is over-coated with one or more gum-bichromate layers, allowing the practitioner to deepen shadows, add chromatic warmth and selectively manipulate density. White learned the technique in dialogue with Stieglitz and with European pictorialists during the Photo-Secession years, and the gum-platinum register he developed sits between the metallic neutrality of pure platinum and the painterly chromatic intervention of full gum bichromate. The Library of Congress holds a print of the work under LCCN 96502102 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.), public domain since 1996. For Maison Picturale, Nude with Baby is a reference both for our platine-palladium workshops and for our gum-platine combination workshops — the gum-bichromate over platine-palladium technique reformulated by Vision Picturale's non-toxic chemistry on 640 g/m² cotton paper, preserving the multi-layer pigmentary register of the 1909 original without the potassium-dichromate hazards of the historical gum-bichromate sensitiser. Princeton University Art Museum holds the major family donation of White prints and negatives, including gum-platinum exemplars contemporary with Nude with Baby, making the Princeton collection the principal scholarly reference for any reconstruction of White's combination-process practice.

Reference file : Library of Congress (via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)