[Boy in Uniform]
Jean-Baptiste Frénet French
Not on view
Known until recently as a painter and draftsman of portraits and religious and allegorical subjects-a member of the so-called Mystic School of mid-nineteenth-century painting in Lyon-Jean-Baptiste Frénet also turns out to have been a remarkably fine photographer. Like so many other painters, he took up the camera in the mid-1850s, first as an amateur and later, beginning 1860, as a professional.
Among the most painterly and engaging of Frénet's pre-professional images-when his family and friends were his models and his garden was his studio-is this darkly printed and deeply Romantic portrait of a boy in his school uniform. Nestled among the foliage and subsumed by shadow, the youth's sensitive features temper and humanize his princely pose.
Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
![[Boy in Uniform], Jean-Baptiste Frénet (French, 1814–1889), Salted paper print from glass negative](/Rodan/dist/svg/rolling-0.9s-30px.svg)
