On the Lake

Lakeside scene published as plate 4 of Camera Work n° 5 (January 1904), reproduced as photogravure from an original gum bichromate print — Demachy's painterly atmosphere on water, in the same six-plate portfolio that introduced Struggle, In Brittany, Severity, Contrasts and another figure plate to the American Photo-Secession. The composition reads as a tonalist riverscape: water and sky merged into a continuous pigmentary plane, the lens almost forgotten, closer to Whistler's nocturnes than to descriptive photography. The format is significant — by reducing the landscape to a horizontal pigmentary bar, Demachy was importing into photography the format of the Symbolist tonal painting and the Japanese-influenced print, both circulating in the Parisian salons of his generation. By 1904 Demachy was the most cited French pictorialist abroad — co-founder with Maurice Bucquet of the Photo-Club de Paris (first Salon de Paris 1894), member of the British Linked Ring (1895), regular contributor to Camera Notes and then Camera Work, and lettered amateur close to the Alphonse Daudet circle. His doctrinal manual Procédés d'art en photographie (1906, with Constant Puyo) was already in preparation. Technically the print is a multi-coat gum bichromate: gum arabic sensitised with potassium bichromate and charged with watercolour pigment, applied in successive layers, each exposed under the negative and brushed back in tepid water until the image reaches the desired painterly density. At Maison Picturale, this kind of lacustrine scene is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper — the master's tonal water preserved without the bichromate hazard.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, Camera Work n°5, 1904 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons