592
of rivers, Cascade dans le Massif central (Philadelphia
Museum of Art). If in some of this photography, as in
Rivière avec effet de lune (Musee d’Orsay), the artifi ce
seems to have been pushed to its extreme, conferring
on these images the characteristic forerunners of the
impressionist current, they do not remain less learnedly
composed. In the same way, one fi nds in the images of
architecture of the area of Arles, this consumed art of
the fi nal improvement giving to the vestiges a romantic
atmosphere, contrary to the topographic sights of the
same place of an Edouard Baldus or a Domenica Roman.
This taste of the effect and formal research so present in
André Giroux gives to the whole of hhis sound oeuvre
a singularity not found elsewhere.
Undoubtedly, André Giroux was a painter much more
than photographer, even if his technical ability in this
fi eld did not have anything to rival that of his famous
contemporaries. To take again the beautiful expression
the photographer Edouard Baldus used to defi ne him,
one could qualify André Giroux as peintre photographe.
But contrary to many photographers such as Edouard
Baldus, Gustave le Gray, Henri le Secq, Charles Nègre
or Roger Fenton, all former painters who gave up paint-
ing for the profi t of photography, André Giroux was the
only one not to disavow his artistic origin. Concerned
with his independence, he never hoped to be among the
members of prestigious Société française de photog-
raphie, however important it was to the supporters of
photographic art. In the custom of the annual Salon des
beaux arts, he exhibited some of his photographs how-
ever with the exposition organized by French Société of
photography in 1857 and 1870, like in Brussels in 1857,
thus showing his will to subject his work to criticism.
His last exposition was held with the Salon of 1874,
during which three of his paintings were presented. He
died a few years later in Paris, in 1879.
Denis Canguilhem
Further Reading
Grishin, Alexander D., et al., André Giroux 1801–1879, Sydney,
The Beagle Press, 2004.
Beaugé, Gilbert, La Photographie en Provence 1839–1895, Paris,
Jeanne Lafi tte, 1995.
Billeter, Erika, Malerei und Photographie im Dialog von 1840
bis Heute, Zurich, Benteli Verlag, 1977.
Bretell, Richard R. et al., Paper and Light: The Calotype in
France and Great Britain 1839–1870, Boston, David R.
Godine, 1984.
Grad, Bonnie L. & Timothy A. Riggs, Visions of City and Coun-
try: Prints and Photographs of Nineteenth-Century France,
Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, 1982.
Hough, Richard, Images on Paper: Mid 19th Century French
Photography, Edinburgh, The Scottish Photography Group
Gallery, 1979.
Jammes, André & Eugenia Parry Janis, The Art of French Calo-
type: with a Critical Dictionary of Photographers 1845–1870,
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1983.
von Dewitz, Bodo, Alles Wahrheit! Alles Lüge! Photographie
und Wirklichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Sammlung Robert
Lebeck, Köln, Museum Ludwig, 1997.
Corot, Courbet und Die Maler von Barbizon ‘Les amis de la
nature,’ München, Haus der Kunst, 1996 [exhibition cata-
logue].
In Relation to Van Gogh: Photography by Contemporaries, Am-
sterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 1990 [exhibition catalogue].GLAISHER, JAMES (1809–1903)
Victorian meteorologist and aerial physicist
James Glaisher was born on April 7th, 1809, at Rother-
hithe, England, and christened at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe,
on April 30th. By 1816 his father, also named James,
and mother, Mary (believed born Middleton), moved
to Greenwich. It is not known to what extent Glaisher
received a formal education. He was introduced to the
work of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, by William
Richardson, a family friend, and assistant observer
there.
Appointed as an assistant to the Ordnance Survey of
Ireland, Glaisher made meteorological measurements
and observations in 1830–1831 on Bencorr Mountain
in Galway, and at the summit of Keeper Mountain (now
Hill) in Tipperary. His obituary in The Aeronautical
Journal of April 1903 quotes him as saying, “In the
performance of my duty I was often compelled to re-
main sometimes for long periods above or enveloped in
cloud. I was thus led to study the colors of the sky, the
delicate tints of the clouds, the motion of opaque masses,
the forms of the crystals of snow.” His interest in atmo-
spheric phenomena may be traced from this time.
Between 1833 and 1836 Glaisher worked as an
astronomical assistant at the Cambridge Observatory
in England, under the direction of George Biddell Airy
(1801–1892), Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge
University. In February 1836 he moved to the Royal
Observatory, Greenwich, where in 1835 Airy had be-
come the 7th Astronomer Royal.
At Airy’s suggestion a separate Magnetic Observa-
tory was built in 1838, and in 1840 Glaisher became
Superintendent of the Meteorological and Magnetic De-
partment, where recordings of variations in the direction
and intensity of the Earth’s magnetism were measured
in order to improve compass navigation, and readings
from thermometers, barometers, and other meteorologi-
cal instruments were taken every two hours, day and
night. In 1848 a system of photographic self-registra-
tion for the instruments, devised by Charles Brooke
FRS (1804–1879), was introduced. Glaisher described
these activities in “The Application of Photography to
investigations in Terrestrial Magnetism and Meteorol-
ogy as practiced at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich”
(Glaisher, 1859).
On December 31st, 1843, James Glaisher married