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BALDUS, ÈDOUARD
was a native of the small German town of Grünebach,
forty-fi ve miles east of Cologne, and, according to some
reports, had fi rst embarked on a career as an artillery
offi cer in the Prussian army before becoming a painter
in the early 1830s. He is said to have exhibited his paint-
ings with some success in Antwerp and to have traveled
throughout America as an itinerant portrait painter,
but neither statement can be confi rmed by surviving
evidence. In Paris, Baldus worked outside the École
des Beaux-Arts and atelier system; he submitted work
to each of the annual salons from 1841 to 1851 but
achieved little success and received no critical mention
as a painter. In the decade that followed, Baldus aban-
doned the easel and took up the camera, rose to the top
of his new profession, won international critical acclaim,
secured commissions from governmental ministries
and captains of industry, and created photographs now
considered masterpieces of art.
Baldus first experimented with photography in
the late 1840s, although no surviving prints can be
defi nitively dated prior to 1851, the year in which he,
Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Hippolyte Bayard,
and O. Mestral were awarded missions héliographiques,
photographic surveys of the nation’s architectural patri-
mony carried out at the behest of the Commission des
Monuments Historiques, a government agency. Baldus’s
mission took him to Fontainebleau, through Burgundy,
the Dauphiné, Lyonnais, Provence, and a small section
of Languedoc. According to an account published the
following year (Baldus, Édouard, Concours de Pho-
tographie, Paris: Victor Masson, 1852), Baldus utilized
his own variation of the paper negative process, which
included a layer of gelatin to provide a smoother surface
and fi ner rendition of detail. Although prints from the
mission héliographique are rare, the majority of nega-
tives from this campaign survive in the collection of
the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Extant prints and negatives
show that Baldus occasionally overcame the limitations
of scale, depth of fi eld, and varying light conditions by
piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of individual negatives
to form a single large composition.
So impressive were Baldus mission pictures for their
clarity, beauty, and size that he quickly won government
support for a project entitled Villes de France Pho-
tographées, a series of architectural views of Paris and
provincial cities that fed a resurgent interest in France’s
Roman and medieval past. After photographing the chief
monuments of the capital in 1852, Baldus returned to the
south of France in the autumn of 1853, accompanied by
a student, Wilhelm von Herford (German, 1814–1866)
and an assistant. There he photographed, for the Villes
de France series and for his stock, many of the same
monuments he had recorded in 1851 on negatives that
he had subsequently been obliged to turn over to the
government. His large-format (35 × 45 cm) negatives of
1853, however, show the Roman theater and triumphal
arch at Orange, the church of St. Trophîme at Arles, the
Tour Magne and Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and other
monuments of Provence with an unprecedented direct-
ness that would establish the standard for architectural
photography. Gone were the picturesque elements, fi g-
ures, and anecdotal details present in his earlier photo-
graphs and traditionally considered necessary to animate
topographic prints of the period.
The following summer Baldus coursed the dirt
roads of the countryside by horse-drawn cart in the
company of Fortuné-Joseph Petiot-Groffi er (French,
1788–1855), moving from ruined castle to thatched hut,
from pilgrimage church to paper mill, from town square
to wooded chasm, through the fertile lowlands and rug-
ged mountains of the Auvergne, in central France. In a
departure from his earlier work, perhaps owing to the
different physical character of this region, Baldus pho-
tographed not only medieval pilgrimage churches such
as Brioude and Issoire, but also vernacular architecture
and unpopulated landscape, adding a poetic force to
the graphic power and documentary value of his earlier
photographs.
By 1855, Baldus had established a reputation as the
leading architectural photographer in France, and his
pictures drew much public attention and critical notice
at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In August
of that year Baron James de Rothschild—banker, indus-
trialist, and president of the Northern Railway—com-
missioned Baldus to produce an album showing views
along the rail route from Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The lavish album, presented to Queen Victoria as a
souvenir of her passage on the line during her state
visit to Paris and still housed in the Royal Library at
Windsor Castle, contains 50 beautifully composed and
richly printed photographs of cathedrals, towns, rail-
road installations, and ports that are among Baldus’s
fi nest images.
Also in 1855, Baldus began photographing on the
worksite of the New Louvre, documenting for the
architect Hector Lefuel every piece of statuary and
ornamentation made for the vast complex linking the
Louvre and Tuileries palaces. As individual records
these photographs served a practical function on the
bustling worksite, keeping track of the many hundreds
of plaster models and carved stones sculpted for the
project. As a collected whole, however, they formed
a new means of comprehending and communicating a
complex subject, bit by bit, to be reconstituted by the
mind. Only photography—precise, omnivorous, prolifi c,
and rapid—and then only in the hands of an artist both
sensitive and rigorous, could produce an archive as a
new form of art. Of the several thousand images made
at the Louvre during the period 1855–57, however, it is
the large-format photographs of the principal pavilions