Robert Demachy

Heir to the Banque Demachy founded by his father Charles-Adolphe, Robert Demachy never had to earn a living and devoted his entire life to art photography — becoming the leading French pictorialist of the early twentieth century. He co-founded the Photo-Club de Paris in 1888 with Maurice Bucquet (Constant Puyo joined as intellectual ally and helped organise the first Paris Salon of 1894), and was elected to the British Linked Ring in 1895. He authored two reference manuals — Photo-Aquatint, or the Gum-Bichromate Process (1897, co-written with Alfred Maskell) and Procédés d'art en photographie (1906, co-written with Constant Puyo), the latter codifying gum bichromate, oil and bromoil techniques. His subjects ranged from intimate portraits and nudes to allegorical figure studies (Speed, Effort, Behind the Scenes, Struggle) and Norman landscapes around Hennequeville and the Touques valley, always with the heavy pigmentary matter and the deliberate sculpting of the image that defined pictorialism. He withdrew to Hennequeville in Normandy from the 1910s onward and, before his death in 1936, bequeathed the essential of his corpus to the Royal Photographic Society (London/Bradford) and the Photo-Club de Paris. Demachy's prints are held at the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the George Eastman Museum (Rochester), the Victoria & Albert Museum / RPS Collection (London/Bradford) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France via the Gallica collection. His patrimonial rights lapsed in 2007 (70 years after his death). At Maison Picturale, his works are reinterpreted in contemporary gum bichromate or bromoil prints, using the non-toxic chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale — a sanitary modernisation of the master's signature he never knew.