India. Ceylon. Colombo. Street Scene, after photo by Dr. Kurt Boeck

1900

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Dominant colour

India. Ceylon. Colombo. Street Scene, after photo by Dr. Kurt Boeck is a 1900 by Photoglob Co., a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Photoglob Co.
When & what style?: 1900 · Impressionism
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a busy street in Colombo, Sri Lanka, packed with people, carts, and bright buildings under a soft blue sky. This isn’t a painting—it’s a photochrom, a kind of early color print made from a black-and-white photo. Workers in Zurich who’d never visited the place added the colors by hand, using up to fifteen different stones. The result looks real but feels a little too perfect, like a postcard. If you like how this mixes photo and print, look up the technique called *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.