110
as the natural heirs to a great tradition of building that
stretched back to Roman and medieval times. The fi nal
section of the album presents the natural beauty of the
Côte d’Azur, including the majestic rock formations at
La Ciotat. The concluding pair of images—the barren,
rocky Ollioules Gorge and the iron and glass railroad
station of Toulon—restates the album’s central theme of
progress, contrasting wilderness and civilization, nature
and man. A dozen examples of the PLM album are cur-
rently known (three in an abridged form).
While the PLM album is a triumphal climax to the
most fruitful period of Baldus’s artistic career, more than
half his professional life still lay ahead. During the next
two decades, he increasingly shifted his energy from
the production of ambitious and carefully crafted works
of photographic art to the commercial and industrial
applications of the medium. In part, personal factors
account for this shift. In the years following the death
of Baldus’s wife Élisabeth in March 1858, her mother
probably helped care for the couple’s children; after his
mother-in-law’s death in April 1862, the responsibili-
ties of fatherhood may have kept Baldus closer to home
and his three teenage children, and prompted him to
focus on Parisian views and on the publication of his
work in gravure form. By 1869, when his daughters
were married and his son had reached majority, Baldus
was approaching sixty, and the labor and hardship that
characterized the extended photographic excursions of
his younger days may have seemed less appealing, less
necessary, or less possible. External factors, however,
were also at work: social and economic forces increas-
ingly pushed photography toward ever-cheaper and
more widely distributed images. In the early 1850s,
few outside scientifi c, artistic, and aristocratic circles
collected photographs, but by 1860 the carte-de-visite
portrait and the stereo card, produced by the thousands
and available at extremely low cost, had brought pho-
tography into the homes of a much broader public. It
was surely in an attempt to market his work to the sou-
venir-seeking tourist and public that Baldus produced a
series of 95 small-format views of Paris (approximately
20 × 30 cm) in the early-1860s, and even tried his hand
at stereographic photography. In contrast to his large-
format work of the previous decade, his smaller, glass-
negative photographs of Paris and the provinces appear
indifferently composed and printed.
Beginning in the mid-1860s and lasting until the
early 1880s—in other words, for more than half his
career as a photographer—Baldus’s primary commercial
activity centered on the production of photogravures,
a process that he had fi rst explored as early as 1854.
Baldus’s photogravure process (or “héliogravure,”
as he called it) triumphed equally as a photographic
method of producing facsimile gravures and as a gra-
vure method of printing photographic images. His fi rst
major publications in gravure form, issued from 1866
to 1869, all reproduced ornamental engravings by past
masters—Heinrich Aldegrever, Hans Sebald Beham,
Jacques Androuet Ducerceau, Albrecht Dürer, Hans
Holbein, and Marcantonio Raimondi.
Baldus first published his own photographs in
photogravure form in a three-volume publication on
the architecture and ornamen tation of the Louvre and
Tuileries palaces that parallels his earlier photographic
albums. Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries: Motifs de
Décorations... must have seemed ironically timely, for
while it was still being issued the Tuileries Palace and
parts of the Louvre were burned down in the destruction
of the 1871 Commune. Although he did not reveal the
details of his process, nor enter the Duc de Luynes’s
competition, Baldus achieved results in photogravure
that were unrivaled in their detail, smoothness of grada-
tion, and richness.
Encouraged by the success of his volumes on
the Louvre, he published a portfolio of one hundred
photogravures reproducing elements of interior and
exterior decoration of the Château de Versailles and of
the Grand and Petit Trianons—garden vases, statuary,
fountains, paneling, moldings, consoles, tables, and so
forth, as well as six exterior architectural views. With
his photogravure publication Principaux Monuments de
la France in the early 1870s, Baldus came full circle,
issuing in gravure form a series of architectural photo-
graphs much like his Villes de France photographiées of
the early 1850s, and, in a few cases, utilizing the same
negatives. Baldus’s last known photographic activity
was a publication in the same vein as his Louvre and
Versailles volumes—a collection of one hundred photo-
gravures of the architectural and sculptural decoration of
the new Hôtel de Ville of Paris, built from 1882 to 1884
to replace the building burned down by the Commune
a decade earlier.
Baldus’s extensive publishing activity did not nec-
essarily signal fi nancial success. Perhaps having over-
extended himself in the production of Hôtel de Ville
or perhaps the victim of other circumstances, Baldus
transferred to his son-in-law more than seven hundred
copper printing plates for the Louvre, Versailles, Hôtel
de Ville, and Ducerceau gravures, and thousands of
unsold prints from those publications as collateral for
a small loan in October 1885, probably to protect the
means of his livelihood from creditors; only fi fteen
months later, in January 1887, he fi led for bankruptcy.
Édouard Baldus died December 22, 1889, in Arcueil-
Cachan, a suburb south of Paris.
The fi rst major exhibition devoted to the photograph
of Baldus was presented at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, the Canadian Centre for Architecture,
Montreal, and the Musée national des monuments fran-
çais, Paris, in 1994 and 1995.