Provenance
- 1984
André Jammes, sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984.
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Not currently on view
[Organ Grinder at 21, quai Bourbon, Ile Saint-Louis, Paris]
Charles Nègre (French, 1820 - 1880)
French
Paris, France (Place Created)
before March or May 1853
Salted paper print from a paper negative
84.XM.344.1
10 × 8.3 cm (3 15/16 × 3 1/4 in.)
Amidst a rapidly changing urban landscape, Charles Nègre photographed traditional street people. The itinerant musician, stooped slightly from the weight of his instrument, is about to enter a door. One foot stands on the step and his hand rests upon the doorknob. In comparison with André-Adolphe-Eugene Disdéri's Organ-Grinder (link to 90.Xm.56.4) made around the same time, this musician is depicted at the weary end of a day's labor rather than playing his instrument.Adapted from getty.edu, Interpretive Content Department, 2008; and Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 57, © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Because exposure times in the 1850s prevented much spontaneity, Charles Nègre had to pose his subject upon the threshold in a stance that the organ-grinder could maintain for the duration of the exposure. The vignette effect of the print's darkened edges was a technical sacrifice that Nègre accepted in order to shorten his exposure time. Serving also as a frame for the subject, the dark rim draws the viewer's attention to the isolated figure and produces a more focused image.
Both Nègre and Disdéri heroicized the workingman a decade before Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet did so in painting. In the process, they aligned themselves with the Realist movement in art and literature.
André Jammes, sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984.
Naef, Weston J. The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), p. 57, ill. no. 55.
Hellman, Karen, ed. Real/Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016), pl. 66.