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on his photogenic drawing process to the Royal Society,
Willmore and the Havell brothers exhibited cliché-verre
prints at the Royal Society in London. Their prints were
made by covering a sheet of glass with etching ground
and smoking it to create an opaque surface. Using a
sharp instrument, they drew designs into the opaque
ground, placed the glass in contact with light-sensitive
paper (made using Talbot’s salted paper process) and
exposed it to light to produce a positive print. Countering
Talbot’s protestation of prior invention, Havell stressed
that unlike Talbot’s process, which sought to faithfully
reproduce the external world, the aim of the cliché-verre
was “to delineate the work of the artist’s pencil by the
Photographic process” (Glassman and Symes, 1980).
By 1841, the cliché-verre technique had been in-
cluded in two technical manuals: Robert Hunt‘s A
Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, and T.H.
Fielding’s The Art of Engraving. Though none of the
earliest cliché-verres appear to have survived, a print
by the English. A fairly simple reproductive process
that required neither the manual skill of engraving nor
the complicated equipment of etching, the cliché-verre
process was nevertheless used only intermittently in the
1840s and few cliché-verre from this period are extant.
The development of cliché verre as a signifi cant artistic
practice did not occur until 1853, when the medium was
independently discovered by the amateur photographer
Adalbert Cuvelier, in collaboration with Léandre Grand-
guillaume, a professor of drawing in Arras, in northeast
France. Together, they introduced the cliché-verre pro-
cess to the circle of artists living and working in Arras in
the 1850s and 1860s that included the landscape painter
and lithographer Constant Dutilleux, lithographer and
photographer Charles Desavary, photographer Eugène
Cuvelier (son of Adalbert), and, most notably, the painter
Camille Corot, who would eventually produce over 65
clichés-verres that ranged from rapid, bold sketches to
more monumental, fully worked compositions.
The period from the early 1850s through the 1870s
was the golden age of cliché-verre in France. Along
with Corot, a number of artists working in and near
the town Barbizon adopted the technique, including
Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, Charles Jaque,
François Millet, Paul Huet and others. Sometimes the
process involved collaboration between photographers
who prepared the plate and made the print and painters
who drew the design. The most common subjects of
nineteenth-century cliché-verre prints are landscape
and rural motifs; as in the case of Corot, cliché-verres
sometimes functioned as studies for a larger painting.
During this fruitful period, artists expanded both
the range and vocabulary of cliché-verre technique
in a number of ways. While the glass plate was most
often coated with collodion to make it opaque, other
techniques included covering the glass with printer’s
ink dusted with white lead powder or with an oil-based
pigment which could be applied onto the plate in varying
thickness to allow for a more subtle modulation of tone
and transparency. Other modifi cations of the process
included placing the emulsion side of the sensitized
sheet onto the bare (unworked) side of glass, rather than
directly onto the hand-drawn surface, before exposure
to light. Because the light traveling through the glass is
refracted before reaching the sensitized paper, it creates
an effect of halation and produces a softer, less linear
print. Another technique for creating a softer, more
impressionistic image involved interposing a second
plate of glass between the hand-drawn glass negative
and the sensitized paper. The surface of the print could
also be given a dotted or patterned texture by using a
roulette wheel (a toothed wheel used in etching) or
lightly tapping the coated plate with a steel brush or
other instrument. Although cliché-verre prints were most
often made on either salted or albumenized paper, some
nineteenth-century artists employed the cyanotype,
gelatin silver or other processes. Varnishing and toning
cliché-verre prints was not uncommon.
Although never a widely popular technique, the
clich é-verre has continued to interest artists and viewers.
In 1921, the Parisian publisher and art dealer Maurice
Le Garrec published Quarante Clichés-Glace, a port-
folio of reprints of cliché-verre plates by Corot, Millet,
Rousseau, Daubigny, and Delacroix. Among twentieth-
century artists who have explored the technique, mostly
using gelatin-silver paper, are Picasso, Brassaï, Max
Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Frederick Sommer.
Artists continue to make clichés-verre prints today,
and have greatly expanded the medium’s technical and
artistic range by using a variety of supports, including
glass and plastic-based fi lms, as well as by experiment-
ing with different photographic processes, such as dye
transfer to make color.
Sarah KennelSee Also: Wet Collodion Negative; Corot, Jean
Baptiste Camille; Cuvelier, Eugène and Adalbert C.;
Dutilleux, Constant; and Talbot, William Henry Fox.Further Reading
Aubry, Yves, “Photostories, Les Clichés-Verre: Corot, L’Initia-
teur,” Zoom 51, May 1978, 100–105.
Barnard, O.H. “The ‘Clichés-verre’ of the Barbizon School,”
Print Collector’s Quarterly, IX, 2, 1922, 149–172.
Le Cliché-Verre: Corot et la gravure diaphane, Gevena : Editions
du Tricorne, 1982.
Glassman, Elizabeth and Marilyn Symes, Cliché-verre: Hand-
Drawn, Light-Printed, A survey of the medium from 1839 to
the Present, Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1980.
Halstenberg, Wolf, Cliché-verre : zur historischen Funktion eines
Mediums, Munich: Maander, 1985.