Les Toits de Paris (Vue de la rue Castiglione?)
1842/50, printed 1865
Medium
Gelatin silver print, No. 15 from the portfolio "Bayard: XXV Calotypes, 1842-1850" (1965)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 19.2 × 24.6 cm (7 9/16 × 9 11/16 in.)
Classification
photographic process
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
23790
Art Historical Context
Hippolyte Bayard's *Les Toits de ParisVue de la rue Cast?)* captures the textured rooftops of 19th-century Paris from an elevated vantage point, likely the bustling rue Castiglione near the Tuileries Garden. Created between 1842 and 1850 using the pioneering calotype process—a paper negative technique that allowed for multiple prints— this image is number 15 from the portfolio *Bayard: XXV Calotypes, 184-1850* (1965). Bayard, a French civil servant turned photographic innovator, rivaled contemporaries like Daguerre and Talbot in the 1840s race to invent photography, though he received less acc...
About the Artist
Hippolyte Bayard · 1801–1887
Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) was a French civil servant and artist who holds a remarkable, if bittersweet, place in the history of photography: he was one of the independent inventors of the photographic process in the late 1830s, developing his own direct positive paper print method at virtually the same moment that Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot were arriving at their own solutions ...