403
envisioned his trip as being solely for his own amuse-
ment. In this he differed radically from his ambitious
contemporary Maxime Du Camp whose travels in Egypt
and the Near East during the same period resulted in the
publication of the fi rst major travel album of its kind. De-
lagrange and Lambrecht did indeed amuse themselves.
According to the latter’s Souvenirs (1873), the two
young men socialized with the British residents, hiked
in the Himalayas for several months, and took great
pleasure in hunting tigers and elephants in other regions
particularly renowned for such sport. No photographs
by Delagrange exist to document these aspects of their
trip. Perhaps due to unfavorable weather conditions and
technical limitations, there is not a single landscape of
the Himalayas such as those by Samuel Bourne taken in
the 1860s. Less explicable is the absence of any pictures
of hunters posed around their dead prey, a theme that
became a staple for British 19th-century tourists.
Returning to France in 1851 Delagrange assembled
two leather-bound photographic albums of Indian ar-
chitecture both titled “Photographies de l’Inde Anglais”
[Photographs of British India]. One, dedicated to the
statesman Adolphe Thiers, contains 61 albumen prints,
each circa 17 by 21 cm, accompanied by Delagrange’s
extensive handwritten notations. The other is captioned
but without a dedication or annotations. It contains 48 al-
bumen prints, all but two identical to those in the Thiers
album. Five of these prints, two co-signed by Lambrecht,
appeared in an album assembled by Victor Regnault in
- Another fi ve were included in Blanquart-Evrard’s
fi rst publication, L’Album photographique de l’artist et
de l’amateur [The Photographic Album of the Artist and
the Amateur] (1851).
From the existing prints that are known to be by
Delagrange it would appear that he took only 63 pho-
tographs during his two-year trip, although it is likely
that he exposed a few negatives during his short stay in
Egypt before arriving in India, even if only as a demon-
stration for Du Camp to whom he taught the wet waxed
paper negative process by Blanquart-Evrard that they
both used throughout their travels. Also missing are any
photographs that Delagrange may have taken during his
fi rst four months in India and the last seven months of
his trip in Cylon, Java, Malaysia, and Singapore.
There is no indication that Delagrange assembled
other albums, or exhibited his pictures, or took up the
camera again after 1851. For the remainder of his life
he turned most of his attention to the administration of
his considerable fortune. In 1870, however, dismayed
by the uprisings of the common people during the Com-
mune, he entered into politics, eventually becoming a
right-wing member of the senate. He left public service
in 1881, retiring to his chateau at Sebourg where he died
11 February 1917.
All of Delagrange’s known photographs depict archi-
tectural monuments and urban views, the one exception
being a portrait of an Indian servant that opens the Thiers
album. Within this circumscribed range Delagrange’s
choices were eclectic. Not surprisingly, he took pictures
of some of the most famous monuments (three of the
Grand Mosque at Delhi and six of the Taj Mahal) but
he also photographed lesser known tombs and temples,
including a general view of a Muslim cemetery. Along
with pictures of famous palaces are those of private
residences, such as the home of an Indian banker and a
British neo-classical bungalow.
Delagrange’s admiration for Indian architecture is
clearly expressed in words, shining through the dry tech-
nical data that characterizes his running commentary
on the photographs. He frequently noted the decaying
conditions of the monuments he depicted and his criti-
cisms of their materials and faulty construction indicate
his schooling as an engineer, yet he avoided a display
of these elements of disintegration in the actual photo-
graphs. This selectivity, along with his straightforward,
centered compositions produces an overall impression of
grandeur and stability. In this regard Delagrange differs
from Linnaeus Tripe, for example, whose focus in the
mid-1850s was primarily on princely palaces, seeing
them, in both image and text, as the ruins of a former
political order. In general, Delagrange’s photographic
choices are indicative of those of a tourist without a
specifi c agenda, imperial or otherwise.
Delagrange’s photographic oeuvre was rarely noted
publicly by his contemporaries, and then only summar-
ily, receiving little attention until the turn of the 21st
century when the unusual nature of his accomplishment
began to be recognized. One album entered into the pub-
lic domain in the collection of the Canadian Center for
Architecture in Montreal. This acquisition and its sub-
sequent exhibition stimulated an interest in Delagrange
prompting a closer look at his annotated album in the
Bibliothèque Thiers in Paris and at the 36 salted paper
prints at the Musée d’Orsay, also in Paris. In addition
to these institutional holdings there are a scattering of
Delagrange prints in private collections.
Julia BalleriniBiography
Alexis Delagrange was born into a noble family in
Douai on 4 April 1825. In 1849, equipped with a cam-
era, he departed for a two-year trip to India, Cylon,
Java, Malaysia, and Singapore accompanied by his
older cousin, the statesman Felix Lambrecht (1819-
1871). Returning to France in 1851 he assembled two
photographic albums of Indian architecture, one whose
intended recipient is unknown and the other dedicated
to the statesman Adolphe Thiers. Although he was one
of the fi rst Europeans to photograph Indian monuments,