The Story of an Albumen Print

I found this print in a charity shop recently. It was sealed in a clear bag and under a mount but it was obviously a real photograph and not a reproduction, looking very much like an albumen print. At £2 it wasn’t a difficult decision to buy it  (This is why my house is packed full of old stuff!)

Luckily this print had been mounted by a framer who knew a bit about old prints. It wasn’t dry mounted or glued to the mount but just held in place with a couple of acid-free paper hinges. The mount hinged open so it could easily be removed without damage. Ideal.
When originally made, the print had been pasted to a piece of thin card. This is quite common as the paper used is very thin and fragile.  Albumen prints are made by coating fine drawing paper in albumen (egg white) before sensitising with sliver nitrate. The prints have a slight satin sheen to them, subtle tonal gradation and very fine detail. The highlights are frequently yellowed, as the egg proteins break down over time.

The faint pencilled caption says “Palais de Tuileries” but no more information. Time for some research…
The palace no longer exists. It used to stand at the western end of the Louvre courtyard- the side now open to the Tuileries garden. It was completed in the 1860s but burned down in the Paris Commune riots of 1871.
This photograph  must therefore have  been made between 1860 or so and 1871. The albumen print would have been made from a collodion negative as the ‘collodion period’ runs from 1851 to about 1874 (“dry plates” were invented in 1871 and most photographers abandoned collodion within a few years)

A Google image search quickly yields some identical pictures. Even if this was a well-used viewpoint the pattern of the open and closed windows and blinds wouldn’t be the same. There are prints in the collections of the Musee McCord, The Biblioteque Nationale and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These fine bodies list their collections online and all list the photographer as Achille Quinet…

Sarah Kennel in the Encyclopaedia of 19th Century Photography has this to say about Quinet:
Achille Léon Quinet (1831–1900)… was a successful photographer who operated a studio at 320 rue St Honoré, Paris from about 1869 to 1879. Although Quinet made photographs of the moments and architecture of Paris as well as a series of views of Italy, he is best known for his landscape… Most of Quinet’s work is housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, where he deposited his Etudes at the Depôt Légal in 1868, 1875, and 1877.
So..
It would appear that what I have here is a photograph from about 1865-1871 (so around 150 years old) and made by a kind of precursor to one of my heroes: Eugene Atget. Quinet, like Atget made photographs of architectural features of Paris as well as “documents for artists”, and (unknowingly in this case) recorded a part of Paris which would soon be destroyed. The picture is technically very well made, but not as lyrical as Atget would have made it. It’s more of a record than an artwork.
The detail is very fine. This is almost certainly a contact print from a negative of around 8 x 10 inches. With a magnifier it’s possible to read the numbers on the clock, which has only one hand…

.. hang on.. This is a collodion image made on a hazy day. The lens would have been stopped down for best sharpness (and a slower “rectilinear” type for architecture) so the exposure time was probably several minutes.  That’s why there’s no minute hand on the clock: It moved during the exposure and was too blurred to register.
[I recently found another example in a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron. Taken over a couple of minutes just before midday it seems: ]

detail from Julia Margaret Cameron image. See the blurred but visible minute hand.

One last little gem: The back of the print has a little pencil drawing on it. - I’ve no clues as to who this woman might be so she will have to remain a mystery. - like how this piece of 150 year old French photography ended up in a charity shop in Hampshire. 

I treasure things like this, and I love living in a world where it’s easy to find the additional information which gives them a life and a story.

Who was this? Why was this drawing on the back of the print? This part will remain a mystery...

UPDATE: September 2017:
Never say never!  - I've just bought a cartes de visite album with a good number of 'celebrity' cartes in it, mainly European royalty. In among them is this one: "Eugenie, Empress of France, wife of Napoleon III"
The carte is reversed (I've flipped it back here for comparison) so maybe the image was traced from a similar print but it's definitely the same picture, so we do know who she was after all.  Blimey! - I'm becoming a proper collector...

... or not.  Mystery solved. Carte de Visite of Eugenie, Empress of France.