1199
Henri Rivière, graveur et photographe, Paris: Musee d’Orsay,
1988.
Loyerette, Henri, Gustave Eiffel, Paris, 1986.
Jeanne, Paul, Les Théâtres d’ombres a Montmartre de 1887 à
1923 , Paris, 1937.
Toudouze, Georges, Henri Rivière: Peintre et Imagier, Paris:
Librarie Editeur, 1907.
Exhibitions (photography—for printmaking exhibitions, see
Fields, 1983).
1983, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Henri Rivière
(1864-1951), A Retrospective Exhibition.
1983, Paris, Palais de Tokyo Le Fonds Gustave Eiffel au Musee
d’Orsay, Petit Journal, no. 130, mai 1983.
1988, Musée d’Orsay, Paris Henri Rivière, Graveur et Photo-
graphe.
Publications
L’Estampe Originale 1893.
ROBERT, LOUIS RÉMY (1810-1882)
French photographer
Louis Rémy Robert was born in Paris on 3 October
1810, the eldest child of two artists, Pierre Rémy
Robert and Anne Caroline Demarne. In 1813, Pierre
Robert moved his young family to Sèvres, where his
father-in-law, Jean-Louis de Marnette Demarne, a
Belgian landscape painter, had secured him a job at the
Manufacture Nationale de porcelaine de Sèvres. As a
boy, Louis Robert assisted in his father in the atelier
de peinture sur verre (glass painting studio) and was
groomed to take a permanent place at Sèvres, but the
Robert family intended that Louis would be more than
an artist or artisan. Following his secondary studies,
Robert studied chemistry with the illustrious chemist
Jean-Baptiste Dumas, probably at the École centrale
des arts et manufactures, a new school of industrial
engineering in Paris. When his father died suddenly in
1832, Robert returned to Sèvres to assume the role of
family breadwinner, and he ultimately spent the rest of
his life at the manufacture in a series of increasingly
important positions. With commissions for stained glass
windows waning in the 1840s, the glass painting studio
was phased out, and Robert ascended to the post of chef
de peinture in 1847. In 1871, Robert became the fi rst
employee from the factory ranks to attain the position
of Director of the Manufacture de Sèvres.
Robert began experimenting with photography
around 1850. Material conditions made the Sèvres fac-
tory a natural place for photography to appear, where
there were laboratories, chemical stocks, and the camera
obscura already in use. Technical advice would have
been available from Robert’s former professor J.-B.
Dumas, who also happened to be an early photographic
expert living in Sèvres. In some early trials, Robert uti-
lized outdated stationery bearing the old “Manufacture
Royale” letterhead for making paper negatives, probably
following Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard’s modifi ca-
tions to William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype process.
Robert was soon experimenting freely with both wet and
dry paper processes. He eventually became a recognized
expert in all the period’s methods, and from 1858 to 1872
he enjoyed a state appointment teaching photography
to engineers at the École des ponts et chausées and the
École du génie maritime.
Raised in an environment fi lled with art and artists,
Robert was already an accomplished portraitist who
had exhibited pastels in the Salon (1848, 1849, 1850)
when he took up the camera, and he may have initially
approached photography with a view to creating aides
memoire. By 1851 he was frequently posing his family
members and colleagues at the Manufacture for por-
traits, many of which are remarkable for their animation
and warmth, notwithstanding their lengthy exposures.
A few images made of his colleagues in the laboratory
are among photography’s earliest images of workers in
the workplace.
Robert’s photographic activity increased steadily
in the early 1850s. This was encouraged in part by the
arrival in 1852 of the new factory director, Victor Reg-
nault, who was an avid amateur photographer. Although
the two men surely shared their interest, experience,ROBERT, LOUIS RÉMY
Robert, Louis-Remy. Alfred Thompson Gobert.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joyce and Robert
Menschel, Mrs. Harrison D. Horblit and Paul F. Walter
Gifts, and Rogers Fund, 1991 (1991.1044) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.