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Maison Picturale
Gertrude Käsebier
Library

1852-1934 · American

Gertrude Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) is the American pictorialist whose maternal portraits — The Manger, Blessed Art Thou Among Women — became Photo-Secession icons. A founding member of Stieglitz's circle and later co-founder of the Pictorial Photographers of America, she elevated commercial portraiture to fine art.

Public domain since 2005 · CPI L.123-1

Held at

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • National Gallery of Art
  • Library of Congress
  • Smithsonian Institution
  • LACMA

Born in Iowa, Käsebier studied painting at Pratt Institute before opening a portrait studio at 273 Fifth Avenue, New York, in 1897. Her allegorical mother-and-child compositions, drawing on Renaissance Madonna imagery and Pre-Raphaelite painting, became defining works of American pictorialism. The Manger (c. 1899) sold for $100 — then the highest price ever paid for a photograph. She was a founding member of the Photo-Secession (1902), featured in the inaugural Camera Work issue (1903), and later co-founded the Pictorial Photographers of America with Clarence H. White, Karl Struss and Edward Dickinson in 1916. Her 1898 series includes both Sioux performers from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show (Chief Iron Tail, Chief Flying Hawk) and other Native American sitters of the period such as the Yankton Sioux writer-violinist Zitkala-Ša — pioneering empathetic Native American portraiture. Her 1905 portrait of Rodin in his Meudon studio is among the most celebrated artist portraits of the period. Held at MET, NGA, LoC, Smithsonian. Public domain since 2005. Her platinum-print practice is a model for Maison Picturale's noble-metal portraits. Today, Maison Picturale's Paris workshops invite practitioners to revisit her platinum and palladium portraiture with the non-toxic chemistries reformulated by Vision Picturale and the Procédé Transposition — preserving Käsebier's tonal range without the legacy hazards.

Essential works

A curated selection of public-domain works by Gertrude Käsebier, reinterpretable as contemporary prints by Maison Picturale's master printers. Each artwork page details the original process and its atelier equivalent.

Print after — systematic mention on the certificate of authenticity.

The Manger (Ideal Motherhood) — Gertrude Käsebier

c. 1899 (platinum print original; photogravure diffusion c. 1900 per NGA) · Platinum print

The Manger (Ideal Motherhood)

Käsebier's most celebrated work, an intimate mother-and-child composition in white robes that became a Photo-Secession icon and one of the highest-priced photographs of its era. First exhibited as a platinum print in 1899 — when a single print sold for $100, then the highest price ever paid for a photograph — and widely diffused in photogravure by Stieglitz c. 1900 (per NGA).

Original held at : National Gallery of Art, Washington · Metropolitan Museum of Art

Reference file source : National Gallery of Art / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

12 of 17 works

The documented corpus

The rest of Gertrude Käsebier's public-domain corpus: plates kept in our editorial archives. Reproducible on request, without dedicated editorial study.

3 archived plates

Labor — Gertrude Käsebier

c.1900

Labor

Platinum print

Allegory — Marriage — Gertrude Käsebier

c.1900

Allegory — Marriage

Platinum print

Portrait of Frances Benjamin Johnston — Gertrude Käsebier

c.1900

Portrait of Frances Benjamin Johnston

Platinum print

Commission a print after Gertrude Käsebier

Maison Picturale produces on commission contemporary prints after works by Gertrude Käsebier that have entered the public domain. Hand-printed by master printers Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour on 640 gsm cotton paper, signed and numbered in limited edition, with a certificate of authenticity explicitly mentioning the "after" nature of the reinterpretation.

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