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from Sébastien Pezetti of Aix-en-Provence while in
high school. His father encouraged Nègre’s ambitions,
helping send him to Paris in 1839 to apprentice in the
studio of Paul Delaroche. Delaroche was one of France’s
most distinguished painters and an early advocate of
photography, counting among his apprentices the the
budding photographers Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton,
and Henri Le Secq.
In 1841 Nègre entered the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and
in 1843 he briefl y worked in the studio of Michel-Martin
Drolling before moving to the studio of Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, where he remained for several
years. Beginning in 1843, he exhibited historical and
mythological paintings at the annual Salon in Paris, and
continued to exhibit there on and off until 1864, well
after he had become better known as a photographer.
Nègre fi rst attempted photography by making da-
guerreotypes in 1844 as an aid to his painting, but by
1848 he had moved to the calotype process for the
greater aesthetic fl exibility offered by its paper negative.
Nègre would modify the negative with ink or pencil
as well as adjust printing methods to meet his artistic
intentions. While his fi rst photographs were primarily
model studies and studio portraits, he soon broadened
his scope to produce action scenes of working people
taken from the streets of Paris. From chimney sweeps
to itinerant musicians or vendors at the market, Nègre
sought formally challenging but unifi ed images of har-
monious effect, reminiscent of the Flemish and Dutch
Masters he much admired.
These genre scenes had an immediate impact on the
emerging photographic community. “The Little Rag-
Picker” (1851), an image of an exhausted boy resting
beside his heavy basket, was deemed “no longer a
photograph” but rather “a thoughtful and intentional
composition” by contemporary critic Francis Wey.
Although those terms do not seem mutually exclusive,
the comment underscores the early perception of the
photograph as merely a mechanical exercise inconducive
to producing pictorial harmony.
Nègre devised a series of lenses to allow for the very
short exposure times required to capture these scenes,
and while the bustling participants in his market scenes
blurred slightly, each is readily distinguishable at his or
her task. It was his “Chimney-Sweeps Walking” (1852),
however, that attracted the most praise for delivering a
sense of arrested movement. As Nègre carefully posed
his three subjects in simulated stride it was not an image
of motion as such, but of an effect that testifi ed to the
artist’s technical and compositional capabilities. While
he occasionally incorporated elements from these pho-
tographs in his Salon paintings, he also mounted and
signed the prints as fi nished works in their own right.
By the early 1850s, Nègre was searching for ways
to live as a professional at his photography without
resorting to the common, stultifying choice of studio
portraiture. Encouraged by the government’s 1851 Mis-
sion Héliographique [Heliographic Mission], which had
employed his friend Le Secq and others to photograph
historic monuments, Nègre spent the summer of 1852
documenting the landmarks of his native Midi region.
Although he had hoped to publish a comprehensive
album of these photographs, he managed only two
installments in 1854 before the project ran aground. A
project to photograph all of Paris’ landmarks, which
occupied him for three to four years in the mid-1850s,
met a similar fate. However, one image from that se-
ries, popularly known as “Le Stryge” [The Vampire]
(c.1853), was a success upon exhibition and has become
an icon of 19th-century photography. A striking hybrid
of Romanticism and modernity, it depicts Le Secq
haughtily posed in his top hat among the grotesque
sculptures decorating the parapet of the cathedral of
Notre Dame, from which he surveys the urban sprawl
like a cosmopolitan demigod.
Nègre’s two excursions to Chartres—in 1851 and
around 1854—illustrate the evolution of his landscape
and architectural work. During his fi rst visit with Le
Secq, Nègre produced idyllic, pastoral village scenes
embodying the picturesque style he had learned while
an art student. The photographs from his second visit,
however, are much larger and concentrate on the city’s
famous cathedral, emphasizing symmetry and monu-
mentality. Infl uenced by the photography of Le Secq
and Edouard Baldus, Nègre approached the building
like a sculptural text to be read in parts, privileging clear
information over sentiment and mood. Despite his sty-
listic adjustments, Nègre struggled to win government
commissions and, perhaps out of desperation, wildly
proposed making a photographic catalog of the history
of man, a suggestion that earned him only a modest
contract photographing selected works in the Louvre.
It was in 1858, on one of his fi nal projects, that Nègre
reconciled his talent for capturing small genre scenes
with the more grandiose demands of public photography
projects. Asked to document a new imperial asylum
erected in Vincennes to house disabled workers, Nègre
favored large plates to depict the complex’s exterior, but
reverted to smaller plates (requiring shorter exposure
times) to capture the interior scenes of employees at
their tasks. These contemplative compositions of cooks,
pharmacists and nurses present labor as simple yet en-
nobling and refl ect Nègre’s belief that a combination of
“observation, sentiment and reason reproduces effects
that make us dream, and simple motifs that move us.”
In “Vincennes Imperial Asylum: The Linen Room”
(c.1858), sunlight falling gracefully on a nun folding
sheets turns her endeavor into a gesture of quiet splendor
worthy of Vermeer.
A founding member of the Société héliographique