Portrait of Lotte

Portrait of Lotte Kühn (1911), one of Heinrich Kühn's four children and a recurring sitter alongside her siblings Hans, Walter, and Edeltrude, who together with their governess and Kühn's longtime muse Mary Warner — the subject of the iconic Study in Tonal Values III (1908) — form the intimate cast of his domestic Pictorialism. This heliogravure, held by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, was among the most widely reproduced of Kühn's family images and circulated through European photographic journals in the early 1910s. The heliogravure technique, a fine intaglio photomechanical method on copper plate, allowed Kühn to disseminate his pictorial vision well beyond the limited circle of original gum bichromate and platinum prints. Dr. Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944), Austrian-German pictorialist, trained in medicine before settling in Innsbruck in 1888 and dedicating his life to perfecting pictorial photography. As a member of the Wiener Kleeblatt (Trifolium) with Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg, and a close interlocutor of Alfred Stieglitz, who published him in Camera Work pl. 18 (1905) and pl. 33 (1911), and Edward Steichen, Kühn led the German-Austrian wing of international Pictorialism. He invented the Platingummidruck (gum-over-platinum) process and was among the first European photographers to adopt the Lumière Autochrome in 1907. His prints are held at the Albertina Vienna, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Städel Museum Frankfurt, and Galerie Maier Innsbruck. Process Transposition Maison Picturale: heliogravure compositions of this kind are studied at the Maison Picturale Paris atelier through Aquaprint MP, the non-toxic Vision Picturale reformulation of gum bichromate, which preserves the matte tonal velvet of Kühn's family portraits without the historical dichromate hazard. Kühn entered the public domain in 2015.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / Rijksmuseum (Public Domain)