[Boy in Uniform]

Jean-Baptiste Frénet

ca. 1855 · Salted paper print from glass negative · Photographs

Known until recently as a painter and draftsman of portraits and religious and allegorical subjects-a member of the so-called Mystic School of mid-nineteenth-century painting in Lyon-Jean-Baptiste Frénet also turns out to have been a remarkably fine photographer. Like so many other painters, he took up the camera in the mid-1850s, first as an amateur and later, beginning 1860, as a professional. Among the most painterly and engaging of Frénet's pre-professional images-when his family and friends were his models and his garden was his studio-is this darkly printed and deeply Romantic portrait of a boy in his school uniform. Nestled among the foliage and subsumed by shadow, the youth's sensitive features temper and humanize his princely pose.

Artist

Jean-Baptiste Frénet

Date

ca. 1855

Medium

Salted paper print from glass negative

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000