903
1930s—including Berenice Abbott, Giséle Freund, and
Walter Benjamin—apparently overlooked him.
Many of Marville’s photographs still reside in the
archives for which they were made. Comprehensive
holdings of his urban documentation are at the Biblio-
thèque historique de la Ville de Paris, the Musée Car-
navalet, and the Bibliothèque administrative de la Ville
de Paris. The Bibliothèque historique also possess 837
of Marville’s glass negatives. The Musée des Monu-
ments français holds a number of photographs from
Marville’s various projects, which were acquired from
the photographer by the Commission des Monuments
historiques. The Bibliothéque nationale in Paris has an
extensive collection of Marville’s calotype work, and the
Bibliothèque municipale de Lille holds a concentration
of his calotypes produced for Blanquart-Evrard.
Peter Barberie
Biography
Charles Marville was born in Paris in 1816. By the
age of nineteen he had begun a career designing wood
engravings and lithographs for books and illustrated
journals. All we know of his artistic training is that at
some point in the 1830s he frequented the Académie
Suisse, a place where paying attendees (Courbet among
them) could draw from a live model. In 1848 Marville
received a commission from the state to paint of copy
Le Brun’s La mort de Saint Bruno for the Church of
Saint Nicholas de Neufchâteau, in the Vosges. There
is no other evidence of his career as a painter, and no
known paintings by him survive. By 1851 he was prac-
ticing photography, making many images both for the
Louvre and for the photographic publishing establish-
ment begun in Lille by Louis-Desiré Blanquart-Evrard.
From that point his freelance work expanded, and he
seems to have enjoyed a lucrative career making art
reproductions, public works records for various city
agencies, and architectural photographs for architects
and builders. Marville lived and worked at many
Paris addresses during his photographic career: 14,
rue du Dragon (1851–53); 27, rue Saint Dominique
(1854–60); 6, rue de la Grande-Chaumière (1861);
86, rue Saint Jacques (1862–67); 75, rue d’Enfer (later
111 and then 75, rue d’Enfert-Rocherau) (1867–79).
He exhibited at the Société française de Photographie
in 1857, 1864 and 1865; his work was shown at the
International expositions in London in 1862, Paris in
1867 and 1878, and Vienna in 1873. The record of
Marville’s death remains to be found; on September 20,
1879, one Armand Guérinet acquired his business and
negatives, eventually selling the latter to the Service
des Travaux historiques.
See also: Société française de photographie;
Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré; and Société
héliographique.Further Reading
Avice, Jean-Paul, Ciels de Paris: huit photographies de Charles
Marville, Paris: Agence culturelle de Paris/Bibliothèque
historique de la Ville de Paris, 1994.
Charles Marville Photographe de Paris de 1851 à 1879, Paris:
Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 1980.
Hambourg, Maria Morris, Charles Marville Photographs of Paris
1852–1878, New York: French Institute/Alliance Française,
1981.
Hungerford, Constance Cain, “Charles Marville, Popuar Illustra-
tor: The Origins of a Photographic Sensibility,” in History of
Photography, vol. 9, no. 3, 1985, 227–246.
Jay, Robert, “The Late Work of Charles Marville, The Street
Furniture of Paris,” in History of Photography, vol. 19, no.
4, 1995, 328–337.
Rice, Shelley, Parisian Views, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1997.
——, Marville/Paris, Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1994.MASURY, SAMUEL (c. 1820–1874)
Samuel Masury was a prominent American daguerreian
artist who learned the process from the renowned John
Plumbe Jr., with whom he was associated for many
years. One of Masury’s most notable images is a portrait
of Edgar Allen Poe taken in November 1848, less than a
year before the writer’s mysterious death at age forty.
Born in Salem, Massachusetts, around 1820, Ma-
sury was educated in the public schools of Boston.
He became a carriage maker, but took a deep interest
daguerreotypes upon their introduction in 1839. In
1842, he became affi liated with Plumbe, and in 1843 he
established his daguerreotype gallery in Salem, operat-
ing as Masury and Company.
Masury also operated a gallery in Providence, Rhode
Island, and operated it from 1845 to 1852. In 1851 or
1852, Masury was seriously injured while experiment-
ing with oxyhydrogen. A fi re ignited a large bag of
oxygen gas, causing an explosion while Masury was
standing on the bag.
Although he never fully recovered from his injuries,
Masury moved to Boston and resumed resumed making
daguerreotypes, and later collodion negatives. He oper-
ated galleries on Washington Street from 1852 to 1867.
He also began producing images for Ballou’s Pictorial
Drawing Room Companion journal, where his photo-
graphs were reproduced as woodcut engravings.
Bob ZellerMATSUSABURO, YOKOYAMA; See
YOKOYAMA MATSUSABURO