The Seine at Clichy

Riverscape on the Seine at Clichy (north-western Paris suburb), published as plate 10 of Camera Work n° 16 (October 1906), reproduced as photogravure from an original gum bichromate print. The Camera Work n° 16 issue was a Demachy portfolio, the most extensive American showcase the French pictorialist would receive — one year before his public quarrel of 1907 with Alfred Stieglitz, who turned against the gum process as overworked and pictorially mannered. Clichy in 1906 was the industrial Parisian periphery, where the Seine carried barges, factories and bridge traffic; Demachy reads it not as documentary urbanism but as a tonal river — water reduced to a continuous pigmentary plane, sky and bank dissolved into atmospheric matter. The choice fits Demachy's bourgeois pictorialism: a banker's son and member of the Alphonse Daudet literary circle, he treated Parisian outskirts the way painters had treated Auvers or Argenteuil. The Seine itself was, by 1906, an Impressionist site of memory, and Demachy was deliberately summoning the Sisley/Monet riverscape tradition into the gum bichromate. By 1906 Demachy was co-founder with Maurice Bucquet of the Photo-Club de Paris (first Salon de Paris 1894), member of the British Linked Ring (1895), and co-author with Constant Puyo of Procédés d'art en photographie (1906), the manual codifying gum, oil and bromoil for the French pictorialist generation. At Maison Picturale, this kind of riverscape is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper — the painterly Seine of the master, without the bichromate hazard.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, Camera Work n°16, 1906 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons