On the seashore, a woman says goodbye to the setting Sun.

Fritz Loescher, in his essay On the Pictures of P. Dubreuil published in the July, 1901 Photographische Mitteilungen writes:

“Adieux au Soleil”: (a picture) “of the purest harmony and the most perfect expression of emotion”:

The farewell to the sun is wonderful in the combination of the most artistic calculation and the favor of the moment. The dark female figure, standing on the far edge of the seashore, stretching out her arms towards the departing sun, is like the embodiment of the longing for the light. And driven by the wind, the veil from the head also blows in the same direction, and the mood of this human soul is expressed in everything to the fullest.

Such pictures are real rarities; one could say that they were achieved not because of, but in spite of, photography. One should not try to imitate them if one is not internally called to such tasks, because even an expert like Dubreuil can perhaps only achieve such success once. (p. 221)

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On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lille (France) photographer Pierre Dubreuil (1872-1944 ) in 2022, The Palace of Fine Arts in Lille held the exhibition “Pierre Dubreuil. Photographic Paintings”. (1.) Critic Gersende Petoux makes some observations on this important early French pictorialist who would go on to become a ground-breaking modernist in later decades:

But Pierre Dubreuil is not a photographer: he is a painter, a draftsman, a poet, a revolutionary, a humanist, a pun lover, a free thinker… Not content with being a pioneer, an innovator in technical and artistic processes in photography, he literally rethought its scope and meaning.

Coming from the pictorialist movement, he makes photography and painting rhyme, using heliogravure, a process combining engraving and photography, gum bichromate prints, requiring the use of a brush and bringing the photographer closer to the painter, reworking his negatives into different prints, which he retouches in as many different expectations, to the point of abstraction. Continues… (2.) (translated)

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1. “Pierre Dubreuil. Tableaux photographiques”. Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts du 20 octobre 2022 au 27 février 2023. The exhibit featured over 90 modern prints from slides made from negatives by Dubreuil in the 1930s as well as original works like this heliogravure.
2. Excerpt: Gersende Petoux, le 6 décembre 2022: Quand la photographie devient peinture – Pierre Dubreuil: Source: Aralya: Tout est art