Musée National du Louvre: Le Trésor Artistique de la France, 12 Livraison

Devoted to a selection of outstanding works of the French artistic heritage, the Trésor was a collection of photographic plates accompanied by brief texts written by various specialist in the period or type of the objects depicted, and in principle it belonged to the well-established genre of illustrated catalogue. It did, however, incorporate major innovation. Most of the photographs were printed using a process called ‘photochromie’, which made it possible to produce a theoretically unlimited number of photographic plates that permanently reproduced not only the outlines and details of the original but also its colors.

Photochromie, or the photochrome process, was an innovative method invented in the early 1870s by Léon Vidal, an active member of the photographic community. After patenting in 1872 and 1874, the inventor continued to refine it in the studios of the Société Anonymes des Publications Périodiques, whose director he became in 1875. There he also produced monochromatic photomechanical prints, such as collotypes or Woodburytypes, which were used to reproduce some of the plates of the Trésor. Nevertheless, this work was the Société’s first publication illustrated with a substantial number of photochromes: thirty of the thirty-nine photographic plates of the Trésor’s first series were printed using the Vidal process. Because color photography was then in its infancy and processes for printing photographs were having difficulty gaining a foothold in the publishing industry, Dalloz [director of the publication] could claim in his foreword that this publication was exceptional, pointing in support of his assertion to the high quality of its texts, the abundant illustrations, and above all to the virtues of the process used to produce them. According to Dalloz, more than any other process, photochromie produced ‘a kind of facsimile’ of the artwork. Thus the Trésor seemed capable of fulfilling the primary mission Dalloz assigned to it in his foreword: ‘to place…the treasures of our national museums in the hands of everyone’. Legitimated by the sponsorship the book received from the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts (Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts), these democratic aspirations were validated, three months after its publication, by the resounding popular success of its plates at the Exposition Universelle (Universal Exposition) as well as by the gold medal awarded to Vidal by the international jury of the photographic section.

There are important differences, however, between the publication’s stated aim and the physical book itself. While certain plates do a good job of supplying the mimetic illusion that the photochrome process was supposed to produce, others are blurred, with muddy colors reducing their appeal and the book’s capacity to popularize them.

Some of the photochromic plates of the ‘Galerie d’Apollon’ bear out the publisher’s claims, displaying a starling realism rooted in the contrast between the opacity of their background and the luminous clarity of objects teeming with details. The resulting impression of depth is further heightened by the material aspect of the plates, which consists of two cardboard sheets, with a window cut out of the upper sheet to the dimensions of the image. Combined with their glossy surface, these features make it seem that one is looking at the three-dimensional object in a glass display case.

Excerpt from Meizel, Laureline. "Le Trésor Artistique de la France: A Representative Example of the ‘Livre-Specimen’ at the Turn of the 1880s," Etudes photographiques, no. 30, December 2010, pp. 101-115 (English version).