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full powers to sign the treaty of Tien-Tsin and a trade
pact with Japan. In 1859 he was made Senator; then in
1861, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1862–63,
he became ambassador to Great Britain. His retirement
taken, he died in Ivry sur Seine in 1870.
It is not known whether he practiced photography be-
yond 1857, the date of the last mention of his name in the
Bulletin of the Société française de photographie. His
production known now consists only of daguerreotypes,
as a large majority of the views of architecture, generally
full plates, of Colombia, London, Athens, and Paris, but
also some reproductions of precision and chemistry, and
works of art (engravings, paintings) out of the common
run. His work is in the following institutions: National
library of France, museum of Orsay, Centers Canadian
of Architecture, George Eastman house, Musée Getty,
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Quentin Bajac
Further Reading
Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes, Chicago and London,
The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
J.B Gros, Recueil de mémoires et de procédés nouveaux concer-
nant la photographie, Paris, 1847.
J.B Gros, Quelques notes sur la photographie, Paris, 1850.
Bernard Marbot et Weston Naef, Regards sur la photographie
en France au XIXe siècle, catalogue d’exposition Petit Palais,
Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1980.
GRUNDY, WILLIAM MORRIS (D. 1859)
English commercial photographer
William Morris Grundy worked in Sutton Coldfi eld,
Birmingham and specialized in stereoscopic views of
picturesque rural scenes. The London Stereoscopic Com-
pany bought about 200 of his negatives, and individual
stereographs still exist. However, Grundy’s work is best
known for the twenty original albumen prints pasted
into the anthology Sunshine in the Country, A Book of
Rural Poetry Embellished with Photographs from Nature
(London: Richard Griffi n and Company, 1861).
The book was published two years after Grundy’s
death. Although it is impossible to be sure, it seems
likely that the photographic vignettes were not specially
commissioned but that the publisher matched them to
suitable poems. Each photograph appears to depict the
subject of a particular poem, such as ‘The Fowler’ or
‘The Squirrel-Hunt,’ though some illustrate less spe-
cifi c subjects such as ‘Rural Pleasures’ or ‘An Autumn
Landscape.’ Each plate is one-half only of the original
stereoscopic view, some keeping the characteristic
rounded top corners. However, many pictures have
been cut into roundels or cut squarely at the corners,
which removes them from Grundy’s own intentions
as stereographs. Yet most images retain the structure
of stereographs, with bold features in the foreground,
middle distance and background.
John TaylorGSELL, EMILE (1838–1879)
French photographerBorn in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (Alsace, France) on
December 31, 1838, E. Gsell was, like J. Thomson, one
of the fi rst ever to photograph the temple of Angkor Vat
in June 1866. He was then following the exploration
mission of the Mekong, under the commandment of E.
Doudart de Lagrée.
In September or October 1886, he established a stu-
dio in Saigon. Afterwards he participated to two other
offi cial missions; one in Hue, April 1875, under navy
lieutenant Brossart de Corbigny, the other upstream the
Red River, with de Kergaradec, French consul in Hanoi,
from November 1876 to January 1877.
The utmost quality of his photographic production
owed him a medal of merit during the World’s fair of
1873 in Vienna. He was on of the fi rst professional
photographers to settle in Saigon and probably the
only one to remain in practice there such a long time,
until his demise on October 16th, 1879. The collection
of his works was then exploited fi rst by O. Wegener in
the early 1880s, then by Vidal, under his name or under
Salin-Vidal, until the end of 1883. His works comprises
hundreds of photographs, portraits, landscapes, most of
which may be found in the photo archives of Guimet
museum, Paris.
Jérôme GhesquièreTHE GUM PRINT
“Gum printing” should really be called colloid print-
ing or the pigment process. The colloid is any liquid
which, when combined with an appropriate sensitizer,
becomes capable of hardening when exposed to light;
in the case of ‘gum printing,’ the colloid can be made
from a combination of: gelatin, or egg white, fi sh glue,
or the more commonly used gum arabic, together with
potassium or ammonium bichromate (the sensitizer),
together with the pigment as colouring material (you can
also use gouache, watercolour etc.) This combination,
colloid + sensitizer + colouring, is called a mucilage or,
in more common usage, an emulsion.
Thus the term ‘gum print’ covers a variety of different
processes which came into their own during the heyday
of nineteenth century “Pictorialist” photography with its
advocacy of photography as a form of self expression
on a par with other art forms, principally painting and
printmaking. In order to become a similar ‘art’ Pictorial-
ist photographers, infl uenced principally by the British