Caryatid, Erechtheion, Athens (56. Athènes. Caryatides. Erecht.)

Girault de Prangey (1804–1892), Courcelles-Val-D’Esnoms, France; by descent to Adrien de Tricornot (d. 1902); [...]; Comte Charles de Simony, Rivière-les-Fosses, France, from 1920; Private collections, France, until 2015; (Christie’s Paris, November 12, 2015, lot 27)

Girault de Prangey died without direct heirs in 1892 and left his estate, the Villa des Tuaires, to a cousin, Adrien de Tricornot, who entrusted its maintenance to Girault’s former groundskeepers, Claude and Catherine Blin. The Blins, along with Girault’s caretakers Gérard and Marie Flocard and their great-grandson, Robert, continued to maintain the villa after Tricornot’s death in 1902. Claude Blin died in 1914, as did his son Julien, who was killed at Les Vosges in World War I. Catherine Blin and her daughters, Marie, Esther, and Eugénie, were unable to keep up the estate after the war and it was purchased, in 1920, by Comte Charles de Simony (1869–1952), a land-owning neighbor and Girault’s distant relative. In a 1934 memoir, Simony stated that before the villa was demolished in 1922, he had discovered 856 daguerreotypes (the majority labelled and dated by Girault) stored in twenty-one purpose-built wood boxes. Simony later made additional box and plate counts, however, that slightly differ from each other but indicate a greater number of boxes (twenty-nine) and plates (more than 900). In 1950, Simony donated sixty-one plates to the Musée Guerin in Switzerland and twenty plates to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF); in 1952, the year of his death, he sold ten plates to the collector and photo historian Helmut Gernsheim, which are now at the University of Texas at Austin. The antiquarian bookseller André Jammes also obtained at least twenty-five plates in 1970 when he advised Simony’s family and heirs, who kept the collection, on conserving the daguerreotypes; some of these were later sold at auction (notably at Sotheby’s, Paris, November 15, 2008). In 2000, Christie’s negotiated a private treaty sale of a further 158 plates to the BnF, acquired for the French government. That sale granted Christie’s the necessary export licenses to offer an additional 233 plates at auctions in London (May 20, 2003 and May 18, 2004) and New York (October 7, 2010). In addition to other private sales, auctions have also been conducted from collections of daguerreotypes and other artwork that was either given away by Girault before his death in 1892 or taken from his villa before it was sold to Simony in 1920 (most notably, Christie’s Paris, November 12, 2015; and Sotheby's Paris, November 9, 2018).

Numbers and titles in parentheses, when present, reflect notations inscribed by the artist on labels on the backs of the plates. Dates, when not provided in a notation, are based on the Chronology from Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey (Pinson, 2019, pp. 202–5), which was established from Girault’s correspondence and from other dated daguerreotypes. Girault numbered his daguerreotypes according to plate (and related storage box) size, rather than by location or date. Extant, numbered daguerreotypes indicate that he numbered the plates sequentially within at least five different classes, each of which correspond to one or more formats—whole, half, long half and third, quarter, and sixth and eighth. Sequentially numbered plates within a single class generally fall within groups by location, as expected, but the overall sequence does not always follow chronologically.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photographs. "Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey," January 28–May 12, 2019.

Musée d'Orsay. "Girault de Prangey photographer," November 2, 2020–July 11, 2021.

Pinson, Stephen C. Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. no. 43, p. 71.