In 1839, when a French official introduced Daguerre's invention in the Chamber of Deputies, he predicted that the new medium would be immensely useful to the arts and sciences, but he spent more time describing its effect on painting and sculpture. Speaking of the benefits to draftsmen and painters, he said:
"The process will afford them a quick and easy method of forming collections of sketches and drawings, which they would not be able to procure, unless they were to spend much time and trouble in doing them with their own hand, and even then they would be far less perfect."Events proved his predictions correct. Photography was expected to be a handmaid to art, and artists used it heavily in place of models, portrait sittings and trips into the field, though for most of the last century no one admitted it.
When Corot died, some 200 photographs were found in his studio. Frederick Edwin Church, the American painter of landscape as spectacle, owned more than 4,000 photographs; Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the English painter who revived the Greeks on canvas, had over 5,000.
We now know how involved Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Courbet and many another artists were with photography. "Studies After Nature: 19th-Century Photographs for Artists," a show of 61 photographs at the Julie Saul Gallery in SoHo, and a more comprehensive catalogue by Ken Jacobson, "Etude d'Apres Nature," address the business of making images for artists and glance at some other realms of interplay between photography and art.
The more consistently delightful images in this show are a few photographs modified by the hand of an amateur artist or a craftsman. Two partially painted photographs from Japan, where the tradition of hand-colored graphics had raised hand-coloring to a high level, have a kind of robust delicacy. The photographs made specifically for artists are generally less well known and more uneven in quality, ranging from lovely to surprising, charming to forgettable.
"Studies After Nature: 19th-Century Photographs for Artists" remains at the Julie Saul Gallery, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, in SoHo, through Jan. 11.