Eugène Atget (1857–1927) - L´Allée de la Duchesse, vers les Cascades, en Eté

Eugène Atget (1857-1927), The Duchess's Alley, toward the Cascades, in Summer, 1925/1981.

Silver gelatin on photograph paper, 17.8 x 23.9 cm, mounted on a backing board (28 x 34 cm) that is numbered, dated, labeled and titled.

Provenance: Private collection, Berlin.

Condition: Good. Images are part of the condition description.

Eugène Atget created in this period – more precisely between March and June 1925 – a famous series of a total of 64 photographs in the overgrown park of the Domaine de Sceaux south of Paris, shortly before the historic complex was extensively restored. In addition to the summer variant, from the same perspective there exists a well-known counterpart in winter ("en Hiver").

Biography
Eugène Atget was born in 1957 in Libourne, France. In 1878 he went to Paris to become an actor, without much success. In 1888 he began photographing. From 1890 he sold his photographs, shot with a large-format camera on glass negative plates, as working material to artists, designers and architects. A large part of his extensive oeuvre of around 8,500 glass negatives was already sold by Atget in 1920 to French institutions. After his death in 1927, the young photographer Berenice Abbott, who had come to know and appreciate Atget through his friend Man Ray, acquired part of the estate and published in 1930 the first survey of Atget's work, which brought him international recognition posthumously.