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 · ca. 1906
Prinz Luitpold mit Schaukelpferd
- Year
- ca. 1906
- Original process
- Platinum print
- Held at
- Münchner Stadtmuseum
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- ca. 1906
- Original held at
- Münchner Stadtmuseum
- 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
Royal portrait of the young Prinz Luitpold of Bavaria (1901-1914), great-grandson of the Prinzregent Luitpold who ruled Bavaria as regent from 1886 to 1912, posed beside his rocking horse circa 1906 — the year Eugene relocated permanently from New York to Germany and began the Munich phase of his career. The platinum print is conserved at the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the German anchor institution of Eugene's corpus. The portrait is a key document of Eugene's privileged access to the Bavarian court: as an American expatriate photographer trained at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Eugene operated at the intersection of Bavarian aristocracy, the Munich modernist scene, and the international Photo-Secession network, and this commission of the heir-to-be (Prinz Luitpold died at age 13 in 1914 of polio, never reaching the throne to which his lineage entitled him) documents the institutional patronage that sustained pictorialist photography in pre-WWI Bavaria. The young prince is photographed standing in courtly child's dress next to a wooden rocking horse — a domestic, almost intimate setting that contrasts with the formal state portraiture of court painters and that shows Eugene's softer pictorialist vein, focused on tonal modelation rather than scratched intervention. The print exhibits restrained scratched-negative work, applied only to the background to soften the ambient tone, the figure left untouched in clean platinum half-tones. This commission helped position Eugene for his Royal Professor appointment in Leipzig in 1913. For Maison Picturale, the Prinz Luitpold portrait anchors the child-portrait module of the platine-palladium curriculum: contemporary digital negative engraved selectively at the burin, contact-printed on hand-coated palladium, in the continuity of Eugene's Bavarian portraiture practice.
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
- PriceOn request
The reference file we hold for this work is too low-resolution for us to commit to a large-format print. We are looking for a better source: write to us and we will answer on this specific point before any order.
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.
