[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.
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![[Boy in Uniform], Jean-Baptiste Frénet (French, 1814–1889), Salted paper print from glass negative](/Rodan/dist/svg/rolling-0.9s-30px.svg)
