Label Text: A member of the French Pictorialist movement, Puyo created photographs with an "impressionistic" touch, softening the focus and manipulating the print. In this photograph, the unfinished church of Sacré-Coeur (built as a penance for the defeat of the French by the Prussians and for the Commune of 1871) is fairly visible in the background. For Puyo, the monumental architecture became the backdrop for the balcony from where a maid observes the tree-lined boulevard below.
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A leading French Pictorialist and a founder of the Photo-Club de Paris, Puyo designed new soft-focus lenses and perfected a variety of printing processes to achieve the painterly aesthetic that Pictorialism favored. In this photograph, an effortlessly attractive woman, one of Puyo’s preferred subjects, peers over the balcony at a tree-lined boulevard below. The beauty and carefree manner of the maid matches the sprawling, romantic cityscape beyond.
MD, 2011
Tags: adults; architecture; cities; domestic space; perspective; times of day; uniforms; urban; weather; women; workers; working Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1989.130 |