Magdeleine Guipet

Portrait of Magdeleine Guipet, a Parisian figure photographed by Demachy in the early 1900s. The print is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and circulates digitally through Gallica, France's photographic memory institution where Demachy deposited a substantial portion of his print archive. The image belongs to the bourgeois portrait practice that occupied Demachy alongside his more public allegorical works: a banker's son and member of the Alphonse Daudet literary circle, he photographed the Parisian society of the Belle Époque the way a portraitist of the third Republic would have painted it — pigmentary atmosphere over likeness, identity dissolved into pictorialist matter. By c. 1905 Demachy was at the height of his European influence, co-founder with Maurice Bucquet of the Photo-Club de Paris (first Salon de Paris 1894), member of the British Linked Ring (1895), and finalising with Constant Puyo the writing of Procédés d'art en photographie (1906), the manual codifying gum, oil and bromoil. The choice of an identified Parisian sitter — Magdeleine Guipet — places the work in the tradition of the named bourgeois portrait inherited from Carolus-Duran and Sargent, a portraiture of social acknowledgement that Demachy translated into photographic pigment. Technically the print is a gum bichromate: gum arabic sensitised with potassium bichromate, charged with watercolour pigment, exposed under the negative and brushed selectively under tepid water — Magdeleine's features emerge from the pigment as if the photograph were a charcoal drawing. At Maison Picturale, this kind of Belle Époque portrait is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper — the painterly likeness of the master preserved without the bichromate hazard.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, c. 1905 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons