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 · 1898
The Man in Armor (Self-Portrait)
- Year
- 1898
- Original process
- Platinum print
- Held at
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- 1898
- 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
Theatrical self-portrait in medieval plate armor, realized in 1898 and conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET DP152113), accessioned via the Alfred Stieglitz Collection. This 1898 staging predates Eugene's permanent move to Germany (1906) and inscribes him in the symbolist-pictorialist current of allegorical, costume-driven tableaux that the Photo-Secession championed against the documentary realism of straight photography. Eugene poses standing, armored chest forward, helmet held in the crook of the arm in the heraldic attitude of a medieval portraitist's sitter — a Dürer-quoting attitude that signals his Munich academy training and his self-positioning as painter-photographer rather than mere recorder. The platinum print exhibits the dense scratched-negative intervention characteristic of Eugene's pre-1910 figural works: cross-hatched lines applied with a metal stylus into the gelatin of the glass plate produce a tactile painterly surface across the dark armor and the background drape, blurring the distinction between photograph, engraving and painted study. This deliberate hybridization is the founding gesture of Eugene's signature method: scratching is not retouching but auteur intervention, claiming the negative as a print plate to be engraved. The work is reproduced in Camera Work no. 30 (April 1910) as a photogravure on Japan tissue, alongside other Eugene self-portraits, in Stieglitz's editorial project to canonize the pictorialist self-image. Held by the MET as a foundational document of American pictorialism. For Maison Picturale, Man in Armor exemplifies the platine-palladium with scratched-negative workshop: digital negative engraved by burin, contact-printed on hand-coated paper, in direct technical and conceptual genealogy with Eugene's auteur intervention on the photographic plate.
Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / MET Open Access (CC0)
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 €
- Grand Aigle76 × 112 cm600 €
- Univers100 × 140 cm1 200 €
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.
