Versailles, Bassin de Midi
Medium
Albumen print
Dimensions
Image/paper: 17.5 × 21.6 cm (6 15/16 × 8 9/16 in.)
Classification
albumen silver print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
124332
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Step into the sun-dappled grandeur of the Palace of Versailles with Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget's *Versailles, Bassin Midi* (1901). This intimate albumen silver print captures the Midday Basin in the palace's expansive gardens, a masterpiece of 17th-century landscape design commissioned by Louis XIV Atget, a pioneering French photographer (1857–1927), meticulously documented Paris and its historic sites in the early 20th, preserving vanishing architectural treasures before urbanization erased them. Atget's unadorned, almost ghostly style—devoid of people or drama—elevates everyday scenes to poetic heights, influencing later modernists like Man Ray and the Surrealists. Here, the basin's reflective waters and symmetrical parterres evoke the Sun King's opulent vision, yet Atget's lens hints at subtle decay, a poignant reminder of time's passage amid eternal elegance. Printed in albumen, a 19th-century process using egg whites for luminous detail and warm tones, this 17.5 × 21.6 cm image exemplifies photography's power as historical record. Housed in the Art Institute of Chicago's Photography and Media department, it invites us to wander Versailles' timeless paths.
About the Artist
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget · 1857–1927
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget was born on February 12, 1857, in Libourne, France, to working-class parents—a carriage maker father who died in 1862 and a mother who passed away soon after, orphaning him at age six or seven. Raised by his maternal grandparents in Bordeaux, Atget briefly pursued a seafaring life before moving to Paris in the late 1870s to study acting at the Conservatoire d'art dramatiq...