1854
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Plaster Cast from the Depaulis Collection is a 1854 by Henri Le Secq, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This photo shows a white plaster hand holding a scroll. The fingers curve gently around the paper. Light catches the edges of the fingers and the scroll’s folds. Le Secq took this in the 1850s, when photographers still tested how to record sculpture. He used a glass plate coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The process took minutes, not seconds. Check out Henri Le Secq (French, 1818–1882) next time you visit the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Henri Le Secq was one of the most gifted early photographers to record architecture and sculpture. This stunning image is from a small, rare group of photographs of the collection of Alexis-Joseph Depaulis (1792–1867), a French engraver and collector of historic paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as casts of ancient and modern objects. The depicted work is a plaster cast made from an early 19th-century neoclassical funerary sculpture created by an uniden-tified artist, probably French. Le Secq's exceptional talent for capturing the broad effects of light and shadow animates…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-Louis-Henri Le Secq des Tournelles (18 August 1818 – 26 December 1882) was a French painter and photographer.
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