124
them still imperfect. This has brought him honor, but not
a single penny. The Government, which has been only too
generous to Monsieur Daguerre, says it can do nothing for
Monsieur Bayard, and the unhappy wretch has drowned
himself in despair.
Oh human fi ckleness! For some time, artists, scientists
and the press took an interest in him, but now that he has
been at the morgue for several days, nobody has recog-
nized him. Ladies and gentlemen, let us discuss something
else so as not to offend your sense of smell, for as you
can see, the face and hands of the gentleman are already
beginning to decay.” (Gautrand, 1986, 221)In fact, Bayard’s hands and face appear darker in tone
than the rest of his body because they were sunburned
when this photograph was made.
In spite of his failure to achieve the recognition he
craved, Bayard remained an important and productive
member of the French photographic community for the
rest of his life. He continued to explore photographic
chemistry, including methods for developing the latent
image on paper. Invented by Bayard in 1839, but not
presented at the French Academy of Sciences until
Feburary 8, 1841—the timing no doubt spurred in part
by Talbot’s announcement of his discovery of the latent
image phenomenon in early January —Bayard’s process
entailed preparing a sheet of paper with potassium bro-
mide and silver nitrate, exposing it while still wet in the
camera, and then exposing the paper to mercury vapors
(as in Daguerre’s process) to reveal the latent image. Ba-
yard also described a second method for developing the
latent image which entailed soaking paper in a sodium
chloride solution, allowing it to dry and then covering
it with a silver nitrate solution. Once dry, the sheet was
exposed to the vapor of iodine crystals (to form silver
iodide), exposed in the camera, then exposed to mercury
vapor, and fi nally fi xed in a hyposulfate solution. In both
cases, the fi nal images were negative.
By 1842, Bayard was using the paper negative
(calotype) process only recently introduced by Talbot
to create a series of photographs of Montmartre. The
two may have met when Talbot visited Paris in 1843;
certainly they were aware of each other’s work, as the
presence of several salted paper prints by Talbot in one
of Bayard’s albums suggests. By 1846, Bayard seems
to have fully abadoned his direct positive paper process
in favor of a modifi ed version of Talbot’s paper negative
process, which he employed with great skill to make
portraits, self-portrait, still-life studies, genre scenes,
and photographs of Paris and its environs. Bayard’s
city views, among the fi rst photographic records of the
changing urban texture of Paris in the 1840s, include a
series on Bayard’s own neighborhood, the Batignolles
(1845), the Seine and other aspects of Paris (1847–8),
and the barricades erected during the Revolution of
- Bayard’s skill with the paper negative process
is also evident in the series of portraits he made in the
1840s. Likely made for personal rather than commercial
purposes, many of these salted paper prints reveal a
simple yet strong composition that concentrate attention
on the nuances of his sitters’ personalities.
An inveterate explorer, in the early 1840s Bayard
also used the daguerreotype process, and beginning in
1849–50 produced highly accomplished prints from
albumen on glass negatives. After 1851, Bayard also
employed the collodion wet plate process. Although he
began his photographic career as an amateur, by 1846,
he was actively selling photographs through print shops
(including English dealer F. Sinnett’s shop at 10 Rue
Vivienne). In 1855, he opened his own studio at 14,
Port-Mahon and in 1861, he founded a portrait studio
with Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), where he made
portraits, landscapes, reproductions of art, and cartes de
visite and was among the fi rst photographers to exploit
the possibilities of mass production of photographic
prints.
Bayard also played an important role in the insti-
tutional development of French photography. He was
commissioned in 1843 to make daguerreotypes of the
Chateau de Blois, which were later used by the architect
Felix Jacqued Duban for his restoration project. In 1851,
Bayard was hired by the Commission des Monuments
Historique, a wing of the French Government, as one
of the founding photographers of the Mission Hé-
liographique, an initiative to document the historic sites
and monuments of France by means of photography. The
only one of the fi ve to employ glass negatives, Bayard
photographed numerous architectural sites in Brittany
and Normandy, some of which were published in 1853
by Blanquart-Evrard in the latter’s album Souvenirs
Photographiques.
Throughout his photographic career, Bayard enjoyed
signifi cant critical and commercial success, particularly
from the early 1850s onward, when the paper negative
and the negative–positive process defi nitively triomphed
over the daguerreotype in France. In 1849, Bayard won
a silver metal for prints made using glass negatives at
the Paris industrial exhibition. In 1851, he garnered an-
other medal at the Cyrstal Palace exhibition in London.
In 1854 he became a founding member of the Societé
Française de Photographie, and served as its secretary
from 1865 until 1881. He participated in the Société’s
exhibitions in 1855, 1857, and, with Bertall, in 1863,
1864, and 1865. In 1862, the pair received a medal at the
Universal Exhibition in London. In 1863, The French
government awarded him the medal of the Legion of
Honor for his contributions to photography. He retired
to Nemours in 1869 and died there on May 14, 1887.
The bulk of Bayard’s oeuvre is conserved at the
Societé Francaise de Photographie, Paris, which holds
some 600 prints as well as notebooks and other archival