Pictorialism examples

Robert Demachy — was a prominent French Pictorial photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century.

What is pictorialism

He is best known for his intensely manipulated prints that display a distinct painterly quality. The elder Charles had started the highly successful financial enterprise of Banque Demachy, and by the time Demachy was born the family was very wealthy. He had no need to earn a living, and there is no record of his having ever been employed anywhere.

His early years were quite idyllic, and each year his family would spend several months at their summer villa near Villers-sur-Mer in Normandy. The rest of the year he was educated in Jesuit schools in Paris, and he became fluent in English by the time he was a teenager. His education also included extensive musical lessons, and he became an accomplished violin player.

About , Demachy, his mother and his siblings left Paris for Brussels due to the increasing dangers of the Franco-Prussian War. His father stayed in Paris as part of the Commune and the Banque Demachy played an important role in financing the resistance efforts. When he turned eighteen Demachy briefly served a year as an army volunteer, but he soon returned to his life of comfort.

Sometime in the late s he began experimenting with photography. For the next thirty years he devoted all of his time to both taking photographs and writing extensively about photography. Within a few years he became frustrated with the conservative views of many of the photographers around him, and in he joined with Maurice Bucquet to form the new Photo-club de Paris.

The members of the Photo-club advocated the aesthetics of Pictorialist photography, and soon the Photo-club was playing a similar role in France as that of the Photo-Secession in the U. Adelia, as she was called, was a member of the important Delano family in America and a distant relative of future American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Little is known about their courtship, but on 2 May Robert and Adelia were married in Paris. Jacques later became a very well known fashion illustrator.