Art collector Antonin Personnaz took autochrome pictures of France’s Oise Valley between 1907 and 1914. He resembled the work of artists he knew, such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Albert Lebourg and Jean-François Raffaelli, Camille Pissarro and Paul Gachet, with his dreamy, impressionistic photographs. He joined the Société française de photographie in 1896 and the Société d’excursion des amateurs de photographie in 1900, an excursion group for amateur photographers.
From 1903 to 1905, he wrote essays on Pissarro and art processes in photography and photographs of Pissarro in his studio. After winning prizes in photography contests, he began working with autochromes, a technique invented by his brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, after winning awards in photography contests. He made more than a thousand plates in that medium, whose grainy rendering gives the work an impressionist quality.
A fantastic collection, in the truest sense, as my rudimentary knowledge led me to believe that the oldest color photographs were those taken from Kodachrome positive film, roughly from 1940 onwards. I couldn’t even imagine that the genius of one person in the early 1900s could push so far as to achieve, even alone, such a high level of color quality and definition. As the introductory text suggests, Antonin Personnaz loved the figurative art of his time so much that he had acquired the ability to see as painters do; he had become a painter himself, even if only in spirit, a virtual painter as we might say today. The framing and composition of the scene were exactly as a true painter would have done. Thank you for this beautiful collection.