448
widow continued to live with and assist Duchenne for
the rest of his life. Duchenne’s position in the highly
professionalised and hierarchical world of French medi-
cine was peculiar. He had no offi cial post but he was
highly regarded as a kind of specialized researcher and
allowed to work with patients in a number of hospitals.
He never presented himself for election to the Academy
of Medicine, but his contributions to medicine were re-
warded by a number of important prizes and the Legion
of Honour. His publications were well known, and he
was received at the court of Queen Victoria. One of the
fi rst doctors to use photographs as scientifi c data, his
photographs of facial expressions were left to the École
des Beaux-Arts where they had been instrumental in the
teaching of anatomy. He died 15 September 1875 of a
cerebral haemorrhage.
See also: Charcot, Jean-Martin; Darwin, Charles
Robert; Emerson, Peter Henry; France; History: 6.
1870s; Londe, Albert; Rejlander, Oscar Gustav; and
Tournachon, Adrien.
Further Reading
Cuthbertson, R. Andrew (ed.), G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, The
Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, Studies in Emotion
& Social Interaction, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Debord, Jean-François, “Le mécanisme de la physionomie
humaine: la vie et l’œuvre de Duchenne de Boulogne,” [The
Mechanism of Human Physiognomy: the Life and Work of
Duchenne de Boulogne] in L’ Âme au corps, arts et sciences,
1793–1993, [The Body’s Soul, Art and Science, 1793–1993]
Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993 (exhibition
catalogue).
Guilly, Paul, Duchenne de Boulogne, Paris: J.B. Baillière, 1936.
(Reprint edition, Marseille: Jeanne Laffi tte, 1977)
Luxenberg, Alisa, “‘The Art of Correctly Painting the Expressive
Lines of the Human Face’: Duchenne de Boulogne’s Photo-
graphs Of Human Expression and the École des Beaux-Arts,”
History of Photography, 25 (2), 2001, 201–212.
Mathon Catherine (ed.), Duchenne de Boulogne, Paris, École natio-
nale supérieure des beaux-arts, 1999 (exhibition catalogue).
Siegert, Bernhard, and von Herrmann, Hans-Christian, “Beseelte
Statuen—zuckende Leichen. Medien der Verlebendigung
vor und nach Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne,” [Animated
Statues—Quivering Corpses: Methods of vivifi cation before
and after Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne] Kaldeidoskopien
3, 2000, 66–103.
Sobieszek, Robert A. (ed.), Ghost in the Shell: Photography and
the Human Soul, 1850–2000, Los Angeles and Cambridge,
MA: LACMA and MIT Press, 1999 (exhibition catalogue).
DUCOS DU HAURON, ANDRÉ LOUIS
(1837–1920)
French inventor and physicist
Ducos du Hauron was born 1837 and is known for his
very early three-color photographs. In particular, he is
known for his subtractive method of color photography
by which it is possible to obtain color prints on paper.
Throughout his youth du Hauron was interested in the
arts, painting and music. At fi fteen he was an accom-
plished pianist. It was not until 1859 that he began to
interest himself in color photography.
It is not clear whether du Hauron was infl uenced by
some early color experiments or not. When he started,
he was not aware of Maxwell’s three-color photographic
demonstrations at the Royal Institution in London,
which took place in 1861. However, du Hauron was
aware of Michel Chevreul’s color experiments which
demonstrated that over one thousand different colors
could be obtained by mixing different proportions of
red, yellow and blue pigments.
To make his first photographic color prints du
Hauron selected red, blue, and yellow color fi lters in
1862, which after experimenting with turned out to be
incorrect however he later amended this in 1869, by
correctly recognizing the primary color fi lters as red,
green and blue. This process involved a viewer rather
than prints, with an array of mirrors to combine the
three dyed positive images into a single image at the
viewing lens. His second photographic negatives were
through green, orange-red and blue-violet fi lters, which
were then converted to positives. The positives were
printed on three sheets of dichromated gelatin incor-
porating carbon pigments of red, blue and yellow color
respectively, i.e. the complimentary colors to those by
which the negatives were recorded. On treatment with
hot water, the parts of the gelatin unaffected by light
were washed away, leaving red, blue and yellow carbon
prints. The three prints, when mounted superimposed,
formed a color photograph.
However, rather than converting them into transpar-
encies for projection he dyed each positive with the
complementary color of its original fi lter. Precisely over-
lapped on white paper, the three fi lms fused into a full
color image of the original. The fi rst public exhibition
of du Hauron’s color photographs took place on 7 May
1869 at the Photographic Society of France in Paris.
Unfortunately, the color sensitivity of black-and-
white negative emulsions at this time was rather poor.
The fi lm was mainly sensitive to blue and some parts
of the green spectrum. There was virtually no red sen-
sitivity at all. Therefore de Hauron’s early color prints
were less than perfect. Even the most correct theory
was bound to lead to unbalanced color photographs
until good panchromatic emulsions were available. Du
Huron reported that the sensitive of the collodion plate to
the three primary colors was 25–30 minutes behind the
red fi lter, 2–3 minutes behind the green fi lter and only
1–2 seconds behind the blue-violet fi lter. However, after
Vogel’s discovery in 1873, that coralline could be used
to extend the sensitivity of silver halides into the green