946
daguerreotypes. In addition, Moulin offered for sale
portraits, genre subjects, and pictures of scenic views
and monuments. Technically innovative, he worked with
Louis-Amédée Mante to produce prints on artifi cial
ivory and marketed steroscopes and English collodion.
With the help of his wife and daughter he also printed
negatives by other photographers, acquiring the rights
to Roger Fenton’s images of the Crimean War.
During the early 1850s Moulin began to show his
work in photographic exhibitions, not only in Paris but
internationally in London, Amsterdam and Brussels.
His work was discussed in such journals as the Revue
photographique, Bulletin de la Société française de pho-
tographie, Le Propagateur, and La Lumière, in which he
was mentioned some thirty times between 1852 and 1866.
Critics like Ernest Lacan praised Moulin’s industry and
in particular the artistry of his genre subjects. With titles
such as The Spinner, The Fisherwoman, The Drinkers,
or Painters at Work, these vignettes of everyday life were
actually staged in the studio or outdoors before moveable
sets. Moulin also stubbornly continued to exhibit his fe-
male nudes, including many among 56 works he showed
during the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. The
critic Paul Perier, however, claimed to fi nd them vulgar
and repetitive, while Moulin’s fi rst biographer, the Abbé
Moigno, though praising Moulin’s hard work and techni-
cal competence, suspected the photographer of not being
truly contrite about his earlier indiscretions.
In 1856 Moulin traveled to Algeria, armed with a
letter of introduction from the Minister of War and ac-
companied by 1,100 kilograms of baggage. He spent
eighteen months traveling and photographing local
offi cials, genre scenes (again often staged on sets),
views, and monuments. La Lumière published exten-
sive excerpts from his letters from Algeria, written in a
colorful, assured style. Moulin’s Algerian work again
shows his strength in genre subjects, though the views
are less effective. Some of these works were engraved
and published in 1858 in L’Illustration. Around 1859
Moulin published more than three hundred as albumen
prints in albums in several formats, variously entitled
L’Algérie photographiée or Souvenirs de l’Algérie.
Moulin recorded government-sponsored festivities
in Cherbourg in 1858 and continued to show his pho-
tographs in major exhibitions, but he gradually ceased
making original work. In 1862 Moulin advertised the
availability of his studio on the occasion of his retire-
ment, though as late as 1866 he submitted work for
inclusion in the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Still
living in 1875, Moulin does not seem to have remained
active as a photographer. To date the diversity of his
work in subject matter and technique has perhaps dis-
couraged monographic study or exhibition; most recent
research on Moulin has appeared in the catalogues of
thematic exhibitions. In recent years, however, Moulin’s
Algerian work has been shown in one-artist exhibitions
in Arles and Algiers.
Donald RosenthalMOULIN, FÉLIX-JACQUES-ANTOINE
Moulin, Felix Jacques. Female Nude standing with back to full-length mirror.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © The J. Paul Getty Museum.