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

Eugène Atget (1857-1927), L'Allée de la Duchesse, toward the Cascades, in Winter, 1925/1981.

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

Provenance: Private collection, Berlin.

Condition: Good. The illustrations are part of the condition report.

Eugène Atget produced during 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, just before the historic estate was thoroughly restored. In addition to the summer variant, from the same perspective there is also a well-known counterpart in winter ('en Hiver').

Biography

Eugène Atget was born in 1957 in the French town of Libourne. In 1878 he went to Paris to become an actor, without much success. In 1888 he began photographing. From 1890 he sold his photographs, taken with a large-format camera on glass negative plates, as working material to artists, designers and architects. A large portion 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.