“What I like are the great original things, synonymous for me with bizarre, the striking things, having no attention to the original idea as new”, confided the author to Cyrille Ménard in 1912; he found here, probably on the beaches of the North Sea, an idea of ​​a scene combining nature and mystery in a composition built on emptiness.” (1.)

Le Coquillage (1903) presents a relatively straightforward treatment of a subject with a Symbolist undercurrent, a young woman in white walks out onto the exposed seabed at low tide and reflects upon a seashell, at the edge of an immense ocean indicated by the misty horizon line. (2.)

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”. (3.) 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… (4.) (translated)

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1. Le Coquillage. Dubreuil. Vers 1903. Le Pictorialisme En France: Michel Poivert, 1992, plate 66, p. 85
2.  A New History of Photography, Michel Frizot, Könemann, 1998: p. 307
3. “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.
4. Excerpt: Gersende Petoux, le 6 décembre 2022: Quand la photographie devient peinture – Pierre Dubreuil: Source: Aralya: Tout est art