An "Enfant terrible" (No One Can Do the Impossible)
Medium
Albumen silver print from paper negative
Dimensions
Image: 8 11/16 × 6 1/2 in. (22.1 × 16.5 cm) Sheet: 13 3/8 × 18 1/8 in. (34 × 46 cm)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.372.4
Tags
Art Historical Context
In the mid-1850s, French photographer Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut captured the playful spirit of childhood in *An "Enfant terrible" (No One Can Do the Impossible)*, an albumen silver print made from a paper negative. This technique, rooted in the calotype process pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot, used a translucent paper negative to produce richly detailed positives coated in egg-white albumen for superior tonal range and permanence. At 8 11/16 × 6 1/2 inches, the image exemplifies early photography's shift from daguerreotypes to more reproducible paper-based methods, allowing...
About the Artist
Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut · 1799–1872
Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut (1799–1872) was a French artist and early enthusiast of photography whose career bridged the worlds of traditional draughtsmanship and the new mechanical image-making technologies that transformed visual culture in the nineteenth century. Trained in the conventions of French academic art, he possessed the skills of a practiced draughtsman before turning his ...