Constant Puyo

Émile Joachim Constant Puyo, known as Constant Puyo, trained at the École polytechnique and began his career as an artillery officer in the French Army, serving in the African campaigns (1881-1883) before retiring with the rank of commandant in 1902 to devote himself fully to photography. He joined the Photo-Club de Paris (founded by Maurice Bucquet alone in 1888) in 1894, becoming one of the leading figures of French pictorialism alongside Robert Demachy and Jean Leclerc de Pulligny, and was elected president of the club from 1921 to 1926. Made Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1894, he authored four reference manuals — Notes sur la photographie d'art (1896), Le Procédé à la gomme bichromatée (1904), Les Procédés d'art en photographie (1906, co-written with Demachy) and Les Objectifs d'artiste (1906, with Leclerc de Pulligny) — theorising soft-focus aesthetics, the gum bichromate process and the oil pigment print (his other technical specialty). His subjects span pastoral landscapes, female portraits (Fantaisie en blanc, Woman with white parasol), and allegorical compositions (Été). Puyo's prints are held at the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (via Gallica), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce. His patrimonial rights lapsed in France in 2004. At Maison Picturale, his works are reinterpreted as contemporary gum bichromate prints using Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry — the soft-focus pictorialist signature preserved without the historical dichromate.