Image: the public-domain reference file. Your print is a hand-made interpretation of it, produced at the studio in Platinum-palladium — its matter and tonality are its own.
Frank Eugene · April 1900
Dido (La Cigale)
- Year
- April 1900
- Original process
- Platinum print
- Held at
- Metropolitan Museum of Art · Art Institute of Chicago · Philadelphia Museum of Art · Münchner Stadtmuseum
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- April 1900
- Original held at
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Public domain
- Since 2007 (CPI L.123-1)
- Printer
- Maison Picturale — Paris 20e studio
- Lead time
- Hand-made · 3 to 5 weeks
Maison Picturale reinterpretation in platinum-palladium
About this work
Allegorical figure study referencing both Virgil's Aeneid and La Fontaine's fable, published in Camera Notes vol. 3 no. 4 (April 1900) and republished as a photogravure in Camera Work no. 30 (April 1910). The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogues the work under its double title Dido (La Cigale) — a polymorphic Venus model that signals Eugene's symbolist-pictorialist program of layered classical and modern allegory. Read as Dido, the figure is the tragic queen of Carthage from book IV of the Aeneid, abandoned by Aeneas and dying on her pyre — a stock motif of 19th-century salon painting that Eugene transposes into photography. Read as La Cigale, the figure is the singing grasshopper of La Fontaine's fable Les Animaux malades de la peste / La Cigale et la Fourmi — the bohemian artist contrasted to the bourgeois ant, a self-portrait by allegorical proxy of the pictorialist as un-thrifty singer. The double title is editorial: the MET catalogue preserves both readings, refusing to collapse one into the other. The print exists across four major institutions — Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Münchner Stadtmuseum — an institutional spread that confirms its status as a Eugene canonical work. The platinum print exhibits Eugene's signature scratched-negative hatching across the drapery and the background foliage, painterly intervention that recodes the photographic figure as engraved tableau. For Maison Picturale, La Cigale anchors a teaching dyad: the platine-palladium workshop reproduces the scratched negative on digital plate engraved at the burin, and the héliogravure workshop transposes the 1910 Camera Work photogravure into the Poitevin process for direct experimental reenactment.
Reference file : Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Procédé Transposition
Print like Frank Eugene today — without the toxics.
Each Maison Picturale print is a material reinterpretation of the image. Three readings of the same work — the original, its closest transposition, and a creative transposition into another procédé.
Noble metals — platinum and palladium — on 640 gsm cotton paper. The longest tonal range in all analog photography.
MP procédé — reformulated non-toxic chemistry, signed by Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour.
View the procédéHistory of the process
The platinotype was invented in 1873 by the British engineer William Willis, who patented the process that same year under the name Platinotype Process. In 1879 Willis founded the Platinotype Company, which sold platinum-sensitised papers across Europe for several decades. Palladium was introduced in the early twentieth century as an economical variant, giving nothing away on tonal quality.
Platinum-palladium quickly became the process of choice for the masters of fine-art photography. Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Frederick H. Evans made it their signature process, and their original prints held at the Royal Photographic Society in London, at George Eastman House in Rochester and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York still testify to platinum's tonal perfection. Stieglitz wrote that platinum offered a wider scale of greys than any other process.
Our approach
Every platinum-palladium print made at the studio at 1 passage Dagorno is a unique piece in a very limited edition, intended for serious collectors and institutions. The cost of platinum and palladium salts — noble metals whose prices follow the financial markets — makes this our premium process. Each print is prepared, sensitised and developed by hand by our master printers.
Our 640 gsm 100% cotton satin watercolour paper suits platinum-palladium particularly well: its pure cotton fibre, free of optical brighteners and alkaline additives, lets the metal salts embed deep in the paper, and its satin surface fully reveals the process's unique warm tonality and exceptional tonal scale.
Inside our studio
1 Passage Dagorno, Paris 20e. Each print is hand-crafted by Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour, using Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry. Limited edition, signed and numbered.
Commission this print
- Hand-printed and signed by Tristan Sidem & Raphaël Lebas de Lacour
- Reformulated non-toxic chemistry (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Limited edition, numbered, certificate of authenticity
- 1 Passage Dagorno studio, Paris 20e
- Delivery 3 to 5 weeks · ships worldwide from France
Formats and prices
- ProcédéPlatinum-palladium
- Coquille44 × 56 cm200 €
- Jésus56 × 76 cm400 €
Firm prices: they follow from the procédé and the paper format, as on our Process pages. 100% cotton paper, 640 gsm, deckled edges. Which formats are offered depends on the resolution of the reference file we hold for this work.
Contemporary print after a work in the public domain (CPI L.123-1, 70 years post-mortem). Hand-crafted reinterpretation by Maison Picturale's master printers — this is not an original vintage by the master. The mention 'after [Master]' is systematic on the print and on the certificate of authenticity.
