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 · 1905
Landscape, Rodin's Garden, Meudon, France
- Year
- 1905
- 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
- 1905
- 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
Landscape, Rodin's Garden, Meudon, France (1905) is an atmospheric platinum print made by Gertrude Käsebier during her European trip of that year, on the same Meudon visit at which she photographed Auguste Rodin in his studio at the Villa des Brillants. While the Rodin portrait remains the more famous outcome of the visit, the garden landscape reveals an entirely different facet of her practice: a painterly treatment of natural space, with trees and sculptures dissolved into a soft tonal continuum reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler and the Tonalist painters Käsebier admired. The print exploits the long mid-tone scale of the platinum process to render foliage, statuary and mist without sharp edges — a deliberate rejection of the documentary aesthetic and an affirmation of the pictorialist credo that photography could be a fine art. The work is held in the Library of Congress as part of the Käsebier-Turner archive (LCCN 2006690446) and is a rare landscape within an output dominated by studio portraiture and figural allegory. It was made the year after Käsebier's grief-image The Heritage of Motherhood (1904) and three years after her co-founding of the Photo-Secession (1902), at the peak of her international reputation. At Maison Picturale, the print is studied as a reference for atmospheric landscape in noble metals, a register often eclipsed in Käsebier's reception by her maternal portraits and Native American series. The Procédé Transposition transposes the platinum process to the non-toxic platine-palladium chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale on cotton paper 640 g/m², preserving the tonal continuity and silvery mid-tones essential to the image's painterly quality.
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.
