Henri Le Secq

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Henri Jean-Louis Le Secq portrayed by Gustave Le Gray (1848)

Henri Jean-Louis Le Secq des Tournelles (born August 18, 1818 in Paris , † December 26, 1882 there ) was a French painter , etcher , art collector and photographer . Together with his contemporary, the photography pioneer Hippolyte Bayard , Le Secq was a member of the Société Héliographique , a group of photographers commissioned by the State Commission for the Preservation of Monuments in Paris, who was to catalog historical buildings with photographs for registration as Monument historique .

Live and act

Henri le Secq: Part of the Royal Gallery on the east side of the south west tower of Reims Cathedral (1851)

Henri Le Secq grew up as the son of a Paris city politician and was early on as a hobby archaeologist to study the history of his hometown, collecting all kinds of ancient artifacts . Le Secq was a student in various Parisian studios and had enjoyed traditional training as a painter and sculptor. Together with his fellow student Charles Nègre , he soon experimented with photographic processes and learned the novel process of the daguerreotype from his friend Gustave Le Gray . Based on traditional academic painting, however, he saw photography only as a “means to an end” and used the camera primarily for the composition of nude studies or still lifes.

In 1851 he and the four photographers Hippolyte Bayard, Édouard Baldus , Gustave Le Gray and Auguste Mestral (1812-1884) were commissioned by the State Commission of the City of Paris to catalog historical buildings as "worthy of monuments" and to record them in photographs for later archiving .

Le Secq on Notre Dame, photographed by his friend Charles Nègre (1853)

Le Secq is considered to be one of the first architecture photographers of the 19th century. His calotypes of French cathedrals, such as Notre Dame de Paris or the Cathedral of Chartres , which have entered the history of photography with documentary and nostalgic significance, are best known . A well-known contemporary photograph by Charles Nègre shows his friend Le Secq on one of the recently restored towers of Notre Dame.

Henri Le Secq only produced paper negatives. When the process went out of fashion in 1856, he gave up photography and worked as an art collector and painter.

The George Eastman House in Rochester , New York , has an extensive archive of work by Henri Le Secq. The Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen houses Henri Le Secq's collection of artistic artifacts.

literature

  • Jean Garrigue: Chartres & Prose Poems , Eakins Press 1971
  • Eugenia Parry: Henri Le Secq, photographe de 1850 a 1860: Catalog raisonné de la collection de la Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs, Paris , Flammarion, 1986, ISBN 2080120565

Web links

Commons : Henri Le Secq  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

swell

  1. ↑ Beaumont Newhall: History of Photography , Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-88814-319-5 , pp. 51, 55f.
personal data
SURNAME Le Secq, Henri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Secq, Henri Jean-Louis; Des Tournelles, Henri Lesecq; Destournelles, Jean-Louis Henri LeSecq
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter, etcher, art collector and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1818
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1882
Place of death Paris