The photographs of Edouard Baldus

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1994 by Malcolm Daniel

Edouard Baldus arrived in Paris to study painting in 1838 when he was twenty-five, shortly before Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1789-1851) first showed his magically precise photographic images to the world. Baldus was a native of the small town of Grunebach, Germany, forty-five miles east of Cologne, and, according to some reports, he first embarked on a career as an artillery officer in the Prussian army before giving up arms for the brush in the early 1830's. He is said to have exhibited his paintings with some success in Antwerp, Belgium, and to have traveled throughout America as an itinerant portrait painter, but neither statement can be confirmed by surviving evidence.

Although the self-taught Baldus worked in Paris outside the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and atelier system, he submitted paintings to each of the annual salons from 1841 to 1851. He achieved little success and received no critical mention as a painter, but in the decade that followed he abandoned the easel and took up the camera, rose to the top of his new profession, won international critical acclaim, secured commissions from government ministries and captains of industry, and created photographs now considered masterpieces of the art.

While he was among the greatest architectural and landscape photographers in France in the 1850's, a golden age for photography, he is now little known outside the restricted circle of photograph collectors, curators, and historians. His obscurity stems in part from a modern preference for the avant-garde over the official (although such a concept is anachronistic applied to photography of the 1850's), a nostalgia for Paris before the massive changes of the mid-nineteenth century, and a political distaste for things associated with Napoleon III (1808-1873). Paradoxically, it is also the result of Baldus's great achievement, for his architectural photographs set the standard for future generations and thus seem familiar now, although they were singular and pioneering in their time.

Baldus first experimented with photography in the late 1840's, when the negative-positive process for paper photographs, invented by Henry Talbot (1800-1877) in England, began to flourish in France. By 1851 Baldus was recognized as one of the few photographers to combine aesthetic sensitivity with great technical prowess in a medium still largely reliant on experimentation and handwork. In that year he was one of five artists selected by the Commission des Monuments Historiques, a government agency, to make a photographic survey of the architectural patrimony of France, with particular emphasis on monuments in need of restoration. Baldus was sent southeast to Fontainebleau, through Burgundy, the Dauphine, Lyonnais, Provence, and a small section of Languedoc.

Artistic imagination and the technical limitations of photography were often in conflict in those early days, and Baldus used both art and artifice to balance them. In his photograph of the twelfth-century cloister at the church of Saint-Trophime in Aries, for example, he overcame the restricted field of his lens and limited sensitivity of his chemicals by assembling a jigsaw puzzle of negatives, each focused and properly exposed for its part of the scene. He minimized the evidence of his handiwork by cutting and joining the pieces along the contours of cornices, columns, or masonry joints and by retouching the prim to mask the seams. Where necessary he drew on his training as a painter: because the vaults almost directly overhead were essential for the true feeling of the space, but virtually impossible to photograph, Baldus printed the entire upper portion of the picture from a hand-painted negative rather than from one made with the camera.

So impressive were Baldus's pictures for their clarity, beauty, and size (some, printed from multiple negatives, were thirty-six inches long) that he quickly won government support for a project entitled Villes de France photographiees. This was a series of architectural views of Paris and provincial cities that fed a resurgent interest in the nation's Roman and medieval past. After photographing the chief monuments of Paris in 1852, Baldus traveled to the south of France in the autumn of 1853. In the photographs he took there, he eliminated precisely those picturesque elements and anecdotal details traditionally considered necessary to animate topographic prints of the period. At the Tour Magne in Nimes, for example, he filled the frame with the ancient Roman tomb, providing no context beyond the pebble-strewn foreground. The aesthetic and human interest in the photograph lies in the contrast between the geometric structure of the monument and the irregularity of its ruined silhouette; in the modulation of highlights, middle tones, and deep shadows; in the variety of texture found on the deteriorating masonry; and in the battle between the builder's desire for an imperishable memorial, the modern restorer's efforts to preserve the past, and the vegetation sprouting inexorably from the monument's high walls.