For its’ time, a radically cropped, unconventional portrait of a child, saying her blessings at the end of a long table adorned with a simple vase of flowers to balance out the composition.

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.) This photograph: Le Bénédicité | The Blessing, is commented on by critic Gersende Petoux:

At the beginning of the 20th century, the craze for Japanese-inspired works thus gave rise to “Le Bénédicité”, a work in the format of a kakemono and with a modernist design, in which the decor takes precedence over the subject. A long tablecloth, a table runner leading our gaze towards the child seated at the table, occupies almost the entirety of this vertical work and makes one of his colleagues say: “Mr. Dubreuil is one of those who deliberately walk towards new horizons”.

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. 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: Le Bénédicité
2. Excerpt: Gersende Petoux, le 6 décembre 2022: Quand la photographie devient peinture – Pierre Dubreuil: Aralya: Tout est art