1345
ence a cabinet of curiosities. Other key early examples
include Hippolyte Bayard’s compositions of garden
implements, domestic objects and plaster casts, such
as In the Garden of 1842 and Talbot’s image of fruit
published in The Pencil of Nature.
The best-known photographers to produce still lifes
are Roger Fenton and Adolphe Braun. Both created still
lifes during the genre’s peak in the 1850s and 1860s.
Fenton’s photographs are some of the most opulent still
lifes made in Britain at the time and joined a vogue
for this genre already proliferating Paris (Frenchman
Henri Le Secq had produced a successful series of still
lifes known as Fantasies around 1855). Fenton’s photo-
graphs, such as Fruit, 1860, have a great sense of texture
and light, drawing on Flemish and French pictorial
traditions. Photography historians Helmut and Alison
Gernsheim suggested that the painter George Lance
used Fenton’s photographs as studies for his paintings,
even though Fenton was the one accused of plagiarism
at the time. Fenton’s still lifes are indeed painterly in
their formal qualities and refl ect the highly privileged
lifestyle of those to whom such exotic foods and fl ow-
ers were available. His compositions regularly include
either shot game or exotic fruits and sometimes mirrors
and rich fabrics. His subjects are highly symbolic and
explore themes such as Christian faith and the transience
of earthly life.
Frenchman Adolphe Braun had worked in Paris as
a textile designer, and after discovering an interest in
photography, set up a large commercial studio, creating
images such as Flower study, 1854. He later exhibited
images of fl owers and fl ower arrangements at the Ex-
position Universale in Paris in 1855. Braun’s work was
enthusiastically received and he won a gold medal for
the sensuality of texture, softness of tone and the play of
refl ections in his images. So infl uential were these pho-
tographs and so great was the demand for them, that he
and his many assistants produced a collection of studies
intended for artists using fl owers in decorative motifs.
The set consisted of 300 plates of fl oral arrangements
and natural fl owers to serve as ‘designs’ for painters
but Braun’s principal market were the fabric designers
employed by the local mills. In 1864, another French
photographer, Charles Aubry, who also worked as a
designer, formed a Paris-based company to manufacture
plaster casts and photographs of plants and fl owers, such
as Leaves, 1864. Although unsuccessful in his business,
he continued to sell the photographs to drawing schools
throughout the 1870s.
Braun’s still life images that incorporate shot game
and hunting equipment, like Still life with Deer and
Wildfowl, c. 1865, can be seen as modern versions of
the work composed by the painters of Northern Eu-
rope. Scenes capturing the ‘bounty of the hunt’ were
extremely popular with still life photographers, as they
had been during the eighteenth century with painters.
Photographers including Fenton, Charles Phillipe Au-
guste Carey, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond, Louise Laffon,
William Lake Price and Victor Albert Prout all created
still lifes on this theme.
Still lifes could sometimes be treated unconvention-
ally, as in Dresden photographer, Hermann Krone’sSTILL LIFES
Bailey, Henry. Trout Roach
etc.
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles © The J. Paul
Getty Museum.