Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville

1884

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Impressionism Realism Late 19th Century Biblical Magi

Dominant colour

Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville is a 1884 by Félix Bonfils, a Impressionism work, depicting Biblical Magi, 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

Two women in dark, embroidered dresses and white headscarves walk down a sunlit Beirut street. One carries a parasol; the other holds a small book. This isn’t a painting—it’s a photochrom, a colored print made from a black-and-white photo. Workers who’d never visited Beirut guessed the colors, layering ink like a paint-by-number. The result feels both real and slightly off, like a memory with the hues wrong. To see more early color photos like this, look up the technique impasto.

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.