The following is a guest post by Mari Nakahara, Curator of Architecture, Design & Engineering and Micah Messenheimer and Michelle Smiley, Curators of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division, drawn from a conversation with Professor David R. Hanlon. We appreciate his willingness to share his research findings and identify the photographers in the Hunt Collection to encourage future scholarship.
David R. Hanlon is a historian who specializes in early photography—images created in the 1840s and 1850s. By studying the prints in the Richard Morris Hunt Collection over the last twenty years, Hanlon has made key attributions to such renowned European photographers as Charles Marville, Edouard Baldus, and Giacomo Caneva. Hanlon’s deep expertise with salted paper prints and European photography provides a valuable perspective on the photographs that form part of Hunt’s legacy. The photographs collected by Hunt and his family have special significance as one of the few collections of early photography that has survived largely intact.
Mari Nakahara (MN): What drew you to keep exploring these photographs over such a long period of time?
David Hanlon (DH): As the archive of an important American architect who was studying in Europe when photography was beginning to blossom, the Richard Morris Hunt Collection contains a unique and deep repository of rare material that includes significant architectural and landscape photographs from the early days of the medium. Determining the full content of these holdings and assessing the material within the context of the artistic circles in which they were created and collected has been the goal of my research over the years.
When I initially visited the collection in 2004 at the American Architectural Foundation’s Octagon Museum, I wanted to learn more about Richard’s brother, Leavitt Hunt, who photographed in Egypt, Greece, and the Holy Land from 1851-52. In looking at the content of the storage boxes, however, it became apparent that the substantial holdings of European images from the 1850s and early 1860s needed to be inventoried and studied. This continuing effort, especially since 2017 after the collection was transferred to the Library of Congress, has yielded some wonderful, and unexpected, finds.
Micah Messenheimer (MM): How does this collection lead you to reassess Richard Hunt’s role as a photography collector and his importance to the history of the photography?
DH: Only a few of the photographic reference archives assembled by 19th century architects survive today, and none of these were begun as early as Hunt’s. While Hunt acquired photographs through the normal channels of booksellers and regional publishers, he also built personal relationships with several early French and Italian photographers, acquiring sets of prints directly from these individuals during his time in Europe. Many of these contacts were gained through his work assisting on the Louvre building project in the first half of the 1850s, where photographers like Édouard Baldus were employed to record the progress. His brother, William Morris Hunt was engaged at the same time with painters and photographers in both Paris and Rome. Through William, Richard came to know of individuals like Gustave Le Gray and Giacomo Caneva, who were artists cultivating the potential of the new medium of photography and training others to do so as well. Richard even learned the process of making calotype (paper) negatives himself, traveling throughout Europe with a camera in the autumn of 1852.
All of these factors make Richard Morris Hunt’s photographic collection unique, considered from a point of view of a formally trained architect and artist who understood the peculiarities of the camera. Finding this assemblage relatively intact (after well over a century in storage) provides a distinctively important new source to assess early photography (especially from Europe). There is a richness to the Hunt Collection that is not duplicated anywhere else in the United States: a broad foundation of images available from artists at the time the photographs were created. We built photographic history from pieces people pieced together from the 20th century art market. Working with and learning from this kind of original collection is an extremely valuable tool for improving our understanding of the history of photography.
MN: You found thirty-three salt prints made by Ernest Benecke in the Hunt Collection. What other images are unique to the Library’s holdings?
DH: Well, in 2019, when we encountered the big collection of Le Gray seascapes, that was very unexpected. I was expecting to see architectural work. We looked at a lot of Charles Clifford and Robert Macpherson photography. But then seeing the Le Gray work appear changed the spin on things. These entailed both calotype images from Fontainebleau and the nearby forest as well as examples of his famous seascape studies made in 1856 and 1857. Subsequent cataloging revealed that the Hunt family had acquired multiple copies of sixteen separate seascape and harbor views (which are among the most celebrated art photos of the 19th century) as well as a set of nineteen albumen prints that Le Gray produced in 1857 of the military officers and cavalry maneuvers at the Camp de Châlons, undertaken at the request of Napoleon III. These discoveries revealed that Hunt was not just buying material from bookstores and publishers in Paris. He was getting involved with artists.
Additionally, much of my attention in recent years has focused on the large number of prints that Hunt acquired from the Paris-based photographer Charles Marville. The blind stamp of Marville appears on the mounts of a number of the Benecke prints. That stamp represents Marville’s role as a printer for individuals who did not have sufficient time or equipment to undertake printing themselves. It appears that Leavitt Hunt also had Marville print a set of images from his Egyptian trip. Brother William relied on Marville to document an early set of his paintings. This family association with Marville I found to be helpful to explain Richard’s interest in Marville’s own projects. The Hunt collection today contains 120 salt prints of Marville’s work from 1851-1854, depicting Parisian city studies as well as sculptures in the Louvre, images from German cities, and architectural elements of the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, Amiens, Strasbourg, and Notre-Dame in Paris. The collection also includes two hundred albumen prints by Marville of Parisian architecture, lamps, decorative elements, and street studies made from the late 1850s through the 1870s. In total, these holdings constitute the largest surviving collection of Charles Marville’s oeuvre outside of Paris.
I was also surprised that within the more than 160 prints that Hunt purchased from Édouard Baldus were a number that he made during the famous 1851 Mission Héliographique project. It is also worth noting that Richard purchased plates from early photographic portfolios published by Louis Blanquart-Evrard as well as Eugène Piot and made substantial investments to acquire many works by Charles Clifford of Spanish architecture and Roman views by Giacomo Caneva, Robert Macpherson, and James Anderson. Certainly, most of the notable strengths of the collection are within French, Italian and Middle Eastern subjects. But the photographs as a whole reflect amazingly well the aesthetics and interests of mid-nineteenth century photography on the continent and the ways in which a number of photographers created bodies of work to cater to the interests of architects, historians, and the public of the time.
MM: Was Richard Morris Hunt the only photography collector in his family?
DH: There are two other players in the story: brother William Morris Hunt and sister Jane Hunt were artists who used photographs. The separation of which pictures belonged to which sibling has gotten blurred over the years because the prints were stored together. But I think the case could be made in the studies of the collection that the Le Gray seascapes, Fontainebleau Forest photos, and the military maneuvers were perhaps acquired by one of Richard’s siblings. His sister, Jane, who was an active artist, could have used the seascapes for her paintings and watercolors.
William knew Marville personally and had Marville photograph his paintings and those pictures are in the collection. William was also a student of Thomas Couture. Couture was an associate of Le Gray’s and a student of Paul Delaroche, who taught Le Gray and Roger Fenton. You can read about these networks when you’re studying the history, and it’s amazing when you see the connections physically in the collection.
MN: Why is nineteenth century European photography important to an American collection?
DH: Photography became a sought-after global technology as soon as the first viable processes were brought to the public in 1839. America’s interest and innovations with the daguerreotype format are well known, but the prospects of photography on paper being mastered by the Europeans would eventually move the medium forward into a new phase of possibilities. Having this component of the story so well illustrated in an American collection allows for an excellent foundation to assess and study the growth of the photographic medium. The many fine print examples in this grouping–with a number of images not found elsewhere–also pairs well with the important collection of daguerreotypes and early American photographs on paper in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, filling out the discussion in an enlightening way.
DH: During my latest research visits we started to delve into Hunt’s portfolios. Hunt, I’m sure, didn’t see a separation between the photographs he collected and the illustrated books. Those should be considered together just because the knowledge and the information that was contained within both of them were a source of equal weight for Hunt. The Noël-Paymal Lerebours Excursions Daguerriennes folios we found, along with other volumes published shortly after photography was introduced, provide additional information. Marville himself was an illustrator before he became a photographer. So, illustrated portfolios with lithographic illustrations are important as well.
MN: In 2021, you published a book on the early photographers of the Middle East, Leavitt Hunt and Nathan Flint Baker– While the Sun Shines. Can we look forward to another book from your research?
DH: Information about the photographic and portfolio content in the Hunt Collection needs to be known by a wider audience. There is enough material here to allow for a variety of topics to be well explored. I hope to be able to select some parts for written analysis, perhaps in the form of several essays (including those published online) or a book. Seeing further how Richard’s library and oversized portfolios reflect a similar consideration of content and subject depiction will be important. Some of the photographs obtained later in his career or by his sons also need to be further assessed. The Hunt Collection is a gift that keeps on giving.
Learn More:
- Enjoy Hanlon’s discoveries among the photos of Ernest Benecke in the Hunt Collection—described in a 2020 blog interview.
- Check out the book While the Sun Shines: The Lives and Pioneering Photographs of Leavitt Hunt and Nathan Flint Baker (David R. Hanlon, 2021)
- Read about Richard Morris Hunt and his collection. Materials in the collection are available by advance appointment.
- View the work of Charles Marville and other photographs in Richard Morris Hunt’s collection.
- Explore photographs taken in Egypt in the 1850s from across the division’s collections.
- Examine more examples of salted paper prints in the collections.
Comments
Very cool!