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.
Gertrude Käsebier · c.1908
Portrait of Clarence H. White
- Year
- c.1908
- Original process
- Platinum print
- Held at
- Library of Congress
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- c.1908
- Original held at
- Library of Congress
- Public domain
- Since 2005 (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
Portrait of Clarence H. White (c. 1908) is Gertrude Käsebier's platinum-print portrait of her fellow pictorialist and longtime collaborator Clarence H. White (1871-1925), made at a turning point in their shared career: White had moved from Newark, Ohio to New York in 1906 and was about to begin teaching at Columbia Teachers College, while both photographers were navigating the slow disintegration of the Photo-Secession under Stieglitz. The sitting captures White in his characteristic restraint — small frame, soft eyes, a stillness of bearing — rendered in the long mid-tone scale of the platinum process and the matt, paper-fibre finish that Käsebier preferred for portraits of artists. The print belongs to the Library of Congress (Käsebier-Turner archive) and is a key document of the friendship that would, in 1916, lead them — together with Karl Struss and Edward R. Dickinson — to co-found the Pictorial Photographers of America after the dissolution of Stieglitz's Photo-Secession. Käsebier and White had been Photo-Secession founders together in 1902 and exhibited side by side in Camera Work; the 1908 portrait visually anchors their alliance against Stieglitz's growing modernist turn toward Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. At Maison Picturale, the print is studied as a reference for pictorialist artist-portraiture and as a node in the network of relationships that structured American pictorialism. The Procédé Transposition transposes Käsebier's platinum process to non-toxic platine-palladium reformulated by Vision Picturale on cotton paper 640 g/m², preserving the long tonal scale, the soft modelling of skin and the silvery neutrality of period platinum without lead or chromium.
Reference file : Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Procédé Transposition
Print like Gertrude Käsebier 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.
