Study

Figure study published as plate 6 of Camera Work n° 16 (October 1906), reproduced as photogravure from an original gum bichromate print. The composition tightens on the model, treated in broad pigmentary planes — emblematic of Demachy's mature phase where photography deliberately approaches charcoal drawing. The Camera Work n° 16 issue was a dedicated Demachy portfolio, the most extensive American platform the French pictorialist would obtain; one year later, in 1907, his public quarrel with Alfred Stieglitz would end the trans-Atlantic alliance, Stieglitz turning against the gum process he had earlier championed in favour of Paul Strand's straight photography. By 1906 Demachy was at the summit 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 since 1895, banker's son with no profession to exercise, lettered amateur close to the Alphonse Daudet literary circle, 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. The plate's title — simply 'Study' — is itself a programmatic refusal of narrative: the photograph is presented as a painter's exercise. Technically the print is a multi-coat gum bichromate: gum arabic sensitised with potassium bichromate, charged with watercolour pigment, exposed under the negative and brushed selectively under tepid water — body and ground sculpted as pigmentary matter rather than recorded as silver-tone detail. At Maison Picturale, this kind of study is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper — the sculpted matter preserved without the historic potassium bichromate.

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