Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Man on a Donkey)

1884

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Dominant colour

Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Man on a Donkey) is a 1884 by Félix Bonfils, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Félix Bonfils
When & what style?: 1884 · Impressionism
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a man riding a donkey in this picture. The man is dressed in traditional clothing, and the scene looks like a street in a Middle Eastern city. This photo was made using a process called photochrom, where a black-and-white image is colored by hand. You can learn more about this kind of image by looking at the work of artist: Félix Bonfils (French, 1831–1885)

The story of this work

Overview

To make a photochrom, a photographic negative was transferred onto a lithographic stone, then printers created a minimum of six and up to fifteen different stones, each with a single color of ink, which were printed atop the black-and-white image. The printers creating the colors had never seen the original locale. Photochroms were popular from the 1890s into the 1910s and were most often collected in albums or framed and hung on the wall.

Did you know?

In the early 1880s,FélixBonfils was among the first photographers to use the Photocrom process, which producedcolor images from a single black-and-white negative.

Read the full account in the museum source.