c. 1880\'s Jean-Leon Gerome SIGNED to Hector Giacomelli Photo by Adolphe Braun For Sale

a.imagelink {color:#0000FF;} a:hover.imagelink {color:#0000FF;} a:visited.imagelink {color:#800080;} a.imagelink img.saleimage { border: 2px solid #0000FF; } a:visited.imagelink img.saleimage { border: 2px solid #800080; } This is a c. 1880\'s cabinet card albumen photograph of Jean-Leon Gerome (see bio below) by Adolphe Braun (bio below) and inscribed by Gerome to Hector Giacomelli (bio below). Measures 4.25\" x 6.5\". See photos for condition.

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Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was \"arguably the world\'s most famous living artist by 1880.\" The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. He was also a teacher with a long list of students.

Early life
Jean-Léon Gérôme was born at Vesoul, Haute-Saône. He went to Paris in 1840 where he studied under Paul Delaroche, whom he accompanied to Italy in 1843. He visited Florence, Rome, the Vatican and Pompeii. On his return to Paris in 1844, like many students of Delaroche, he joined the atelier of Charles Gleyre and studied there for a brief time. He then attended the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1846 he tried to enter the prestigious Prix de Rome, but failed in the final stage because his figure drawing was inadequate.

His painting The Cock Fight (1846) is an academic exercise depicting a nude young man and a very thinly draped young woman with two fighting cocks, with the Bay of Naples in the background. He sent this painting to the Paris Salon of 1847, where it gained him a third-class medal. This work was seen as the epitome of the Neo-Grec movement that had formed out of Gleyre\'s studio (including Henri-Pierre Picou and Jean-Louis Hamon), and was championed by the influential French critic Théophile Gautier, whose review made Gérôme famous and effectively launched his career.

Gérôme abandoned his dream of winning the Prix de Rome and took advantage of his sudden success. His paintings The Virgin, the Infant Jesus and Saint John and Anacreon, Bacchus and Eros took a second-class medal at the Paris Salon in 1848. In 1849, he produced the paintings Michelangelo (also called In his Studio) and A Portrait of a Lady.

In 1851, he decorated a vase later offered by Emperor Napoleon III of France to Prince Albert, now part of the Royal Collection at St. James\'s Palace, London. He exhibited Greek Interior, Souvenir d\'Italie, Bacchus and Love, Drunk in 1851; Paestum in 1852; and An Idyll in 1853.

Important commissions
In 1852, Gérôme received a commission to paint a large mural of an allegorical subject of his choosing. The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, which would combine the birth of Christ with conquered nations paying homage to Augustus, may have been intended to flatter Napoleon III, whose government commissioned the mural and who was identified as a \"new Augustus.\" A considerable down payment enabled Gérôme to travel and research, first in 1853 to Constantinople, together with the actor Edmond Got, and in 1854 to Greece and Turkey and the shores of the Danube, where he was present at a concert of Russian conscripts making music under the threat of a lash.

In 1853, Gérôme moved to the Boîte à Thé, a group of studios in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris. This would become a meeting place for artists, writers and actors, where George Sand entertained the composers Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Gioachino Rossini and the novelists Théophile Gautier and Ivan Turgenev.

In 1854, he completed another important commission, decorating the Chapel of St. Jerome in the church of St. Séverin in Paris. His Last Communion of St. Jerome in this chapel reflects the influence of the school of Ingres on his religious works.

To the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he contributed Pifferaro, Shepherd, and The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, but it was the modest painting Recreation in a Russian Camp that garnered the most attention.

Orientalism
In 1856, he visited Egypt for the first time. Gérôme\'s itinerary followed the classic grand tour, up the Nile to Cairo, across to Faiyum, then further up the Nile to Abu Simbel, then back to Cairo, across the Sinai Peninsula through Sinai and up the Wadi el-Araba to Jerusalem and finally Damascus. This would herald the start of many orientalist paintings depicting Arab religious practice, genre scenes and North African landscapes.

Among these are paintings in which the Oriental setting is combined with depictions of female nudity. The Slave Market, The Large Pool of Bursa, Pool in a Harem, and similar subjects were works of imagination in which Gérôme combined accurately observed Middle Eastern architectural details with idealized nudes painted in his Paris studio. (In 2019, the right wing populist German party, Alternative for Germany, used The Slave Market in a campaign poster in the 2019 European Parliament election.)

In his travels, Gérôme collected artefacts and costumes for staging oriental scenes in the studio, and also made oil studies from nature for the backgrounds. In an autobiographical essay of 1878, Gérôme described how important oil sketches made on the spot were for him: \"Even when worn out after long marches under the bright sun, as soon as our camping spot was reached I got down to work with concentration. But Oh! How many things were left behind of which I carried only the memory away! And I prefer three touches of color on a piece of canvas to the most vivid memory, but one had to continue on with some regret.\"

Gérôme\'s reputation was greatly enhanced at the Paris Salon of 1857 by his display of Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, Memnon and Sesostris, Camels Watering, and Suite d\'un bal masqué (purchased by the duc d\'Aumale, now in the Musée Condé in Chantilly; a copy made by Gérôme in 1859, The Duel After the Masquerade, is in the Walters Art Museum).

Return to Classical subjects
In 1858, he helped to decorate the Paris house of Prince Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte in the Pompeian style. The prince had bought his Greek Interior (1850), a depiction of a brothel also in the Pompeian manner.

In Ave Caesar! Morituri te Salutant, shown at the Salon of 1859, Gérôme returned to the painting of Classical subjects, but the picture failed to interest the public. King Candaules (1859) and Phryne Before the Areopagus and Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia (both 1861) gave rise to some scandal by reason of the subjects selected by the painter, and inspired bitter attacks by Paul de Saint-Victor and Maxime Du Camp. Also at the 1861 Salon he exhibited Egyptian Chopping Straw and Rembrandt Biting an Etching, two very minutely finished works.

In 1863, he married Marie Goupil (1842–1912), the daughter of the international art dealer Adolphe Goupil. They would have four daughters and one son. Upon his marriage he moved to a house in the Rue de Bruxelles, close to the Folies Bergère. He expanded it into a grand house with stables with a sculpture studio below and a painting studio on the top floor.

Atelier at École des Beaux-Arts
Gérôme was appointed as one of the three professors at the École des Beaux-Arts. He started with sixteen students. Between 1864 and 1904, more than 2,000 students received at least some of their art education through Gérôme\'s atelier at the École des Beaux-Arts. Places in Gérôme\'s atelier were limited, keenly sought and highly competitive. Only the best students were admitted and aspirants considered it an honour to be selected. Gérôme progressed his students through drawing from antique works, casts and followed by life study with live models generally selected on the basis of their physique, but occasionally for their facial expression in a sequence of exercises known as the academie. Students drew parts of a bust before the entire bust, then parts of the live model before preparing full figures. Only when they had mastered sketching were they permitted to work in oils. They were also taught to draw clearly and correctly before consideration of tonal qualities. In his school, the floor sloped so that students had the fullest view of the model from the rear of the room. Students sat around any model in order of seniority, with the more senior students towards the rear so that they could draw the full figure, while the more junior members sat towards the front and concentrated on the bust or other part of the anatomy.

According to John Milner, who studied with Gérôme, his atelier was the most \"riotous\" and \"lewd\" of all the studios at Beaux-Arts. Students were treated to bizarre initiation rites which included slashing each other\'s canvases, throwing students down stairs, out of windows, and onto upturned stools, staging fencing matches on the model\'s dais, in the nude and with paintbrushes loaded with paint.

Gérôme attended every Wednesday and Saturday, demanding punctilious attendance to his instructions. His reputation as a severe critic was well-known. One of his American students, Stephen Wilson Van Shaick, commented that Gérôme was \"merciless in judgement\" yet possessed a \"singular magnetism.\" Although Gérôme was very demanding of his students, he offered them considerable assistance outside Beaux-Arts, inviting them to his personal studio, making recommendations to the Salon on their behalf, and encouraging them to study with his colleagues.

Honors and mid-career works
Gérôme was elected, on his fifth attempt, a member of the Institut de France in 1865. Already a knight in the Légion d\'honneur, he was promoted to an officer in 1867. In 1869, he was elected an honorary member of the British Royal Academy. The King of Prussia, Wilhelm I, awarded him the Grand Order of the Red Eagle, Third Class. His influence became extensive and he was a regular guest of Empress Eugénie at the Imperial Court in Compiègne. Along with the most eminent French artists, he was invited to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français (Society of French Orientalist Painters), founded in 1893, named Gérôme honorary president.

The Execution of Marshal Ney was exhibited at the Salon of 1868. On behalf of Ney\'s descendants, Gérôme was asked to withdraw the painting, but did not comply. The general reception was very split and the 1868 Salon marked the beginning of a lasting divide between Gérôme and many French art critics, who accused him relying of literary techniques, of commercialising art, and of bringing politics into art. Henri Oulevay made a caricature where Gérôme is depicted in front of the wall with the art critics as the firing squad.

In 1872 Gérôme produced Pollice Verso, a painting of bloody gladiators and blood-thirsty Vestal virgins in the Colosseum that would become one of his most famous works. Alexander Turney Stewart purchased the painting from Gérôme at a price of 80,000 francs, setting a new record for the artist. Gérôme\'s imagery of the turned thumb to signal life or death for a fallen gladiator would be repeated in a multitude of movies, from the silent era up to and including the 2000 Oscar-winner Gladiator.

Gérôme returned successfully to the Salon in 1873 with his painting L\'Eminence Grise (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), a colorful depiction of the main stair hall of the palace of Cardinal Richelieu, popularly known as the Red Cardinal (L\'Eminence Rouge), who was France\'s de facto ruler under King Louis XIII beginning in 1624. In the painting, François Le Clerc du Trembly, a Capuchin friar dubbed L\'Eminence Grise (the Gray Cardinal), descends the ceremonial staircase immersed in reading the Bible while all others either bow before him or fix their gaze on him. As Richelieu\'s chief adviser, L\'Eminence Grise was called \"the power behind the throne,\" which became the known definition of his title.

Sculpture
In his fifties, Gérôme took up sculpture. His first work was a large bronze statue of a gladiator holding his foot on his victim, based on his painting Pollice Verso (1872) and shown to the public at the Universal Exhibition of 1878. The same year he exhibited a marble statue at the Salon of 1878, based on his early painting Anacreon, Bacchus and Eros (1848).

Aware of contemporary experiments of tinting marble (such as by those by John Gibson), he produced Dancer with Three Masks combining movement with color, first exhibited in 1902 and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen.

Among his other sculptures are Omphale (1887) and the statue of the duc d\'Aumale which stands in front of the Château de Chantilly (1899).

He experimented with mixed ingredients, using for his statues tinted marble, bronze and ivory inlaid with precious stones and paste. His Dancer was exhibited in 1891. His lifesize statue Bellona, in ivory, bronze, and gemstones, attracted great attention at the 1892 exhibition in the Royal Academy of London.

Gérôme then began a series of conquerors, wrought in gold, silver and gems: Bonaparte Entering Cairo (1897), Tamerlane (1898), and Frederick the Great (1899).

Gérôme and Impressionism
During the last decades of his career, as his own work fell out of fashion, Gérôme was harshly critical of Impressionism. In 1894, he caused a scandal over his opposition to the Caillebotte bequest to the state which eventually became the foundation of the Musée d\'Orsay collection. He organized a public demonstration in his atelier and gave interviews to reporters, including these comments published in the journal L\'Éclair:

The Institut de France cannot remain still before such a scandal...How can the government dare welcome such a collection of inanities into a museum? Why, have you seen the collection? The state, the ward of such junk!... What lessons are our young artists going to receive from now on? They\'ll all start to do Impressionism! Ah! these people believe they are painting nature, nature so admirable in all its manifestations! What pretension! Nature is not for them! This Monet, do you remember his cathedrals? And that man used to know how to paint! Yes, I\'ve seen good things by him, but now!

Similarly he objected to the Manet memorial exhibition at the École des Beaux Arts in 1884. But he did attend the opening, after which he paid Manet the backhanded compliment that the exhibition was \"not so bad as I thought.\"

Beginning in 1890, Gerome again drew inspiration from the ancient world with an interconnected, slyly self-referential series of paintings and sculptures that depicted Pygmalion and Galatea; the spirit of Tanagra; and himself.

In 1890, Gérôme made at least two paintings of the mythical Greek sculptor Pygmalion kissing his statue of Galatea at the very moment she is transformed from marble into living flesh. The most famous of these paintings titled Pygmalion and Galatea is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it shows the sculptor and his living statue from the rear. A variation (in private hands) shows them from the front.

Also in 1890, responding to widespread fascination with the ancient Tanagra figurines recently excavated in Greece, Gérôme sculpted the 5-foot-high, tinted-marble Tanagra, a female nude personifying the Tyche, or presiding spirit, of the ancient city. She holds on her upraised palm a figurine of a female Hoop Dancer (Gérôme\'s own invention, inspired by, but not a copy of, an actual Tanagra figurine). \"Inspired by his characteristic desire for both archaeological accuracy and realism, Gérôme delicately tinted the skin, hair, lips, and nipples of his Tanagra, causing a sensation at the Salon of 1890.\"

Gérôme subsequently created smaller, gilded bronze versions of Tanagra; several versions of the \"Hoop Dancer\" figurine held by Tanagra (these would become \"Gérôme\'s most popular and widely reproduced sculpture\"); two paintings of an imaginary ancient Tanagra workshop where copies of his own Hoop Dancer are on display; and two self-portraits of himself sculpting Tanagra from a living model in his Paris atelier, in which a Hoop Dancer and two different versions of Pygmalion and Galatea can be seen in the background. This complex self-portrait has been called \"a summation of Gérôme\'s remarkable career as both painter and sculptor.\"

Gérôme also sculpted a tinted-marble Pygmalion and Galatea (1891) based on his paintings.

In this cycle of works, with its exploration of Classical antiquity, creative inspiration, doppelgängers, and female beauty, we see Gérôme \"powerfully evoking the continuous interplay between painting and sculpture, reality and artifice, as well as highlighting the inherently theatrical nature of the artist\'s studio.\"

Beginning in the mid-1890s, in the last decade of his life, Gérôme made at least four paintings personifying Truth as a nude woman, either thrown into, at the bottom of, or emerging from a well. The imagery was inspired by an aphorism of the philosopher Democritus, \"Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well.\"

Truth Coming Out of Her Well, Armed with Her Whip to Chastise Mankind was exhibited in the Salon du Champ de Mars of 1896. It has been assumed that the painting was a comment on the Dreyfus affair, but art historian Bernard Tillier argues that Gérôme\'s images of Truth and the well were part of his ongoing diatribe against Impressionism.

Gérôme himself invoked the metaphor of Truth and the well in a preface he wrote for Émile Bayard\'s Le Nu Esthétique, published in 1902, to characterize the profound and irreversible influence of photography:

La photographie est un art. La photographie force les artistes à se dépouiller de la vieille routine et à oublier les vieilles formules. Elle nous a ouvert les yeux et forcé à regarder ce qu\'auparavant nous n\'avions jamais vu, service considérable et inappréciable qu\'elle a rendu à l\'Art. C\'est grâce à elle que la vérité est enfin sortie de son puits. Elle n\'y rentrera plus.

Photography is an art. It forces artists to discard their old routine and forget their old formulas. It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen; a great and inexpressible service for Art. It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.

In 2012, the Musée Anne de Beaujeu [fr] in Moulins, France, which now owns the painting, mounted the exhibition La vérité est au musée (\"Truth is at the Museum\"), which collected numerous drawings, sketches, and variants made by Gérôme, and by other artists, relating to the painting and its theme. The multiplie interpretations of the painting\'s enigmatic meaning prompted one of the museum\'s curators to say, \"C\'est notre Joconde à nous.\" (\"This is our Mona Lisa.\")

Death
On 31 December 1903, Gérôme wrote to his student and former assistant Albert Aublet, \"I begin to have enough of life. I\'ve seen too much misery and misfortune in the lives of others. I still see it every day, and I\'m getting eager to escape this theatre.\" He was to live just ten more days.

On 10 January 1904, \"the maid found him dead in the little room next to his atelier, slumped in front of a portrait of Rembrandt and at the foot of his own painting Truth\"—but the source for this anecdote, the biographer Moreau-Vauthier, does not specify which painting of Truth. He was 79.

At his own request, he was given a simple burial service without flowers. But the Requiem Mass given in his memory was attended by a former president of the Republic, most prominent politicians, and many painters and writers. He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in front of the statue La Douleur (Pain), which he had cast for his son Jean who had died in 1891.

Legacy
Gérôme\'s legacy lived on through the works of his thousands of students from many countries, including Odilon Redon, Mary Cassatt, Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, Stanisław Chlebowski, Ahmed Ali Bey, and Hosui Yamamoto, and many who traveled to Paris from the United States to study under him, including Thomas Eakins, Edwin Lord Weeks and Gottardo Piazzoni.

Gérôme\'s prodigious energy, long career, and wide popularity resulted in an enormous body of work that now resides in museums and private collections around the world; Ackerman\'s revised catalogue raisonné of 2018 lists approximately 700 paintings and 70 sculptures.

His well-researched and minutely detailed images of gladiator combats, chariot races, slave markets, and many other subjects from the ancient world created an indelible impression on popular culture.

His ethnographic imagery of Arab and Islamic culture, controversial in his own lifetime, is now even more closely scrutinized, as is his penchant for female nudity; modern critics raise issues of \"cultural appropriation\" and \"sexual exploitation\". These issues of sex and race were epitomized by the use in 2019 of his painting The Slave Market in an anti-Muslim campaign poster by the right wing populist German party, Alternative for Germany, to the consternation of the American museum that owns the painting.

Despite charges that the Orientalizing paintings of Gérôme (and others) exploited and indulged in stereotypes of Arab and Muslim cultures, there is now \"a high level of interest in collecting Gérôme\'s art in the Middle East,\" as evinced by high prices paid at sale for his work by the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha.

In the early 1870s Gérôme was known for an astonishing range of visual exotica, all realized in precise, minute detail, achieved with thin layers of paint that revealed nary a brushstroke...His works were particularly sought after by wealthy Americans...Over the course of his career, Gérôme sold to American patrons 144 paintings, nearly a quarter of his production. [A work by Gérôme in the Nob Hill mansion of Leland Stanford was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.] Despite his prodigious output and enormous transatlantic success, most scholarly articles of recent decades cite Gérôme\'s work as a noxious blend of the trite, the exploitative and the stultifying academic. However, the latest scholarship is re-evaluating Gérôme and his importance in the nineteenth century. A 2010 essay by art historian Mary G. Morton…points out that, contrary to most twenty- and twenty-first century perspectives…Americans [in the 1800s] found Gérôme\'s paintings complex, edifying and completely modern.

His highly vocal opposition to Impressionism was a losing argument, and his work was relegated to the margins of art history by critics, historians, and museum professionals who believed that

his chosen themes corrupted the loftier purposes of art, thus leading to commercialism...they also objected to his orientalism, which they disparaged for being untrue, a perversion or concoction of the true Orient....Now, with the exhibition at the Getty Museum, and a larger version of the show opening at the Musée d\'Orsay in October 2010, Gérôme is finally receiving the attention he deserves. No longer will he be lost in time, although his paintings, the way he developed them, and his relationship with many of the major issues of artistic creativity in the nineteenth century and beyond will remain controversial.

As with other painters of Classical Realism and Academic art of the 19th century, Gérôme\'s prestige and popularity sharply declined in the 20th century; his painting The Snake Charmer, which sold for $19,500 in 1888, sold for $500 in 1942. Now his works are once again sought-after in the international art market. In 2008, his painting Femme circassienne voilée or Veiled Circassian Beauty (1876) was saleed for 2,057,250 GBP; it now belongs to the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha. In 2019, his painting The Harem in the Kiosk (c. 1870–1875) realized 2,655,000 GBP at sale, and his painting Riders Crossing the Desert (1870) realized 3,135,000 GBP.

The most wide-ranging single collection of Gérôme\'s work may be the several rooms dedicated to displaying his paintings and sculptures at the Musée Georges-Garret in the artist\'s hometown of Vesoul. Gérôme donated several works to the museum during his lifetime, and his heirs donated more works after his death.

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Jean Adolphe Braun (13 June 1812 – 31 December 1877) was a French photographer, best known for his floral still lifes, Parisian street scenes, and grand Alpine landscapes.

One of the most influential French photographers of the 19th century, he used contemporary innovations in photographic reproduction to market his photographs worldwide.

In his later years, he used photographic techniques to reproduce famous works of art, which helped advance the field of art history.

Life
Braun was born in Besançon in 1812, the eldest child of Samuel Braun (1785–1877), a police officer, and Marie Antoinette Regard (born 1795). When he was about 10, his family relocated to Mulhouse, a textile manufacturing center in the Alsace region along the Franco-German border. He showed promise as a draftsman, and was sent to Paris in 1828 to study decorative design. In 1834, he married Louis Marie Danet, who he had three children with: Marie, Henri, and Louise. That same year, Adolphe, alongside his brother Charles, opened the first of several unsuccessful design partnerships.

After several unsuccessful design ventures in the 1830s, he published a successful collection of floral designs in 1842. Upon the premature death of his wife 1843, Braun sold his Paris studio and moved back to Mulhouse, where he became chief designer in the studio of Dollfus-Ausset, which provided patterns for textiles. He remarried to Pauline Melanie Petronille Baumann (1816–1885) on 12 December 1843 and had two more children with her; son Paul Gaston and daughter Marguerite.

In 1847, he opened his own studio in Dornach, a suburb of Mulhouse.

In the early 1850s, Braun began photographing flowers to aid in the design of new floral patterns. Making use of the recently developed collodion process, which allowed for print reproduction of the glass plates, he published over 300 of his photographs in an album, Fleurs photographiées, in 1855. These photographs caught the attention of the Paris art community, and Braun produced a second set for display at the Paris Universal Exposition that same year.

In 1857, Braun formed a photography company, Braun et Cie, and with the help of his sons, Henri and Gaston, and several employees, set about taking photographs of the Alsatian countryside. These were published in 1859 in L’Alsace photographiée, and several were displayed at the 1859 Salon.

By the 1860s, the Braun et Cie studio was operating in a factory-like manner, producing all of its own materials except paper. The studio created thousands of stereoscopic images of the Alpine regions of France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Braun also produced a number of large-format panoramic images of the Alpine countryside, using the pantoscopic camera developed by English inventors John Johnson and John Harrison.

In the mid-1860s, Braun invested in a new carbon print method developed by English chemist Joseph Wilson Swan. In 1867, Braun used the new carbon method to create a series of large-format hunting scenes entitled, Panoplies de gibier. He also used the new carbon print method to produce photographs of well-known works of art at places such as the Louvre, the Vatican, and the Albertina, as well as various sculptures in France and Italy. This endeavor proved successful, and Braun focused primarily on art reproductions for the remainder of his career. After his death in 1877, his son, Gaston, continued operating Braun et Cie into the 20th century.

Photography historian Naomi Rosenblum described Braun\'s work as representative of the relationship between art and commercialism in the mid-19th century. His self-sustaining Mulhouse studio helped elevate photography from a craft to a full-scale business enterprise, producing thousands of unique images which were reproduced and marketed throughout Europe and North America. Rosenblum also suggests that Braun\'s detailed reproductions of works of art in European museums brought these works to art students in North America, providing a major catalyst for the field of art history in the United States.

Braun\'s early photographs were primarily of flowers, originally taken to complement his work as a pattern designer. Subsequent photographs focused on Alpine landscapes, especially lake scenes, and glacier scenes. Unlike many landscape photographers during this period, Braun liked to include people in his scenes. Photography historian Helmut Gernsheim suggested that Braun was one of the most skillful photographers of his era in rendering composition. While not known as a portraitist, he did take portraits of several notable individuals, including Pope Pius IX, Franz Liszt, and the Countess of Castiglione, mistress of Napoleon III.

Braun\'s work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the George Eastman House, and the Musée d\'Orsay. His photographs of Parisian street scenes and Alpine landscapes are frequently reproduced in works on the history of photography.

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Hector Giacomelli (April 1, 1822 in Paris – December 1, 1904 in Menton), was a French watercolorist, engraver and illustrator, best known for his paintings of birds.

Biography
His Italian father, a professor of singing, was first an engraver before becoming an industrial designer for a jeweler. When he was 30 years old, a serious illness forced him to go away from Paris. He then started to draw and paint plants, insects and birds around his new and spectacular house. Making much money in Paris, he developed a passion for the work of Auguste Raffet, whose catalogue of works he published in 1862. He worked with Gustave Doré, for which he composed ornaments like \"The Holy Bible according to the Vulgate\", published in 1866. He contributed drawings to several illustrated newspapers, such as Le Monde illustré, Le Magasin pittoresque, and L\'Illustration. He also privately illustrated books that brought him wealthy bibliophiles. He was one of the organizers of the exposition of the century prints of 1887 and Section retrospective of Fine Arts, and the Universal Paris Exposition of 1889.

Illustrating on top of other artists like Jules Michelet, André Theuriet François Coppée and Alfred de Musset, Giacomelli also became a renowned collector.​
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