Origins of the Digital Catalogue of Eynard’s Photographic Work

Origins and history of the project

The “Eynard Project” was launched in 2008 at the behest of the director of the Bibliothèque de Genève, Jean-Charles Giroud, and the assistant curator of the Centre d’iconographie de la Bibliothèque de Genève, the late Serge Rebetez. The project follows on the heels of an older initiative that led the Centre d’iconographie’s curator Livio Fornara to mount an exhibition of Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s work at La Maison Tavel and undertake an initial conservation-restauration campaign in the 1990s [1]. The new project’s aim was twofold, to establish an exhaustive catalogue of the daguerreotypes produced by the amateur photographer Jean-Gabriel Eynard (1775-1863), one of the pioneers of photography in Switzerland; and to ally with that legacy a program of initiatives (publication, exhibition) designed to familiarize the general public with his extensive body of work. There were ninety-six works by the photographer in the Bibliothèque de Genève collections then and ninety-two in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (the Getty Center). The entire corpus was estimated at the time to be between 230 and 250 items. To carry out the project and assist him in his research, Serge Rebetez joined forces with the historian of photography Nicolas Crispini, who had begun in the late 1980s an initial inventory, which was to remain unpublished. Together they set to work searching for sponsors and making the necessary contacts with institutions that held items by the photographer, sent out appeals to possible owners of daguerreotypes inviting them to make themselves known, sought to get in touch with collectors and Eynard’s descendants, initiated research work, and started gathering the documentation.

With Serge Rebetez’s death in the spring of 2012, the project was put on hold; the Centre d’iconographie no longer had the necessary resources to complete it in the form it was initially meant to have. An interim review shortly after Mr. Rebetez’s passed away made clear both the interest of the work done to that point and the distance that still needed to be covered. The number of items identified was now nearly 400, including 135 unknown pieces that were conserved in a family collection in Geneva. In 2013, the Bibliothèque de Genève was able to acquire this remarkable set of works. The Bibliothèque also launched a conservation-restoration program of the whole of its collections of Eynard daguerreotypes, and drawing on these, it assembled a selection of twenty-nine masterpieces which it exhibited as part of the 2016 show at Geneva’s Musée Rath called Révélations. Photographies à Genève. At the same time, the Centre put in place a documentary watch for spotting the first appearance on the art market of works that could be added to the “Eynard” catalogue.

The “Eynard” catalogue, a collective endeavor

In 2017, the Bibliothèque de Genève decided to relaunch the “Eynard Project” and complete the catalogue raisonné of his photographic work. The Bibliothèque named Ursula Baume Cousam, a research assistant at the Centre d’iconographie, to carry out this scholarly study. The decision was made to focus first and foremost on the collections of the Centre d’iconographie. In 2019, Ms. Baume was temporarily assisted in her work by the art historian Isabelle Roland, appointed by the Bibliothèque de Genève to finalize the catalogue entries.

At the same time, the Bibliothèque de Genève pushed on with its campaign to conserve and restore its daguerreotypes. Part of this collection was transferred to a center specialized in the conservation of photography, the Institut pour la conservation de la photographie, headed by Christophe Brandt; the rest of the works requiring less extensive treatment were handled by the Bibliothèque’s own specialized unit for preserving and conserving its collections, the Unité régie, headed by Nelly Cauliez. A range of conservators from that unit took part in the project, in particular Florane Gindroz, Isabelle Haldemann, and Cinzia Martorana.

The idea of a printed book was abandoned in favor of a digital catalogue, experience having demonstrated the need to be able to regularly update a work that is constantly being enriched by the discovery of new pieces. Direction of this part of the project was assigned to Alexis Rivier, the curator in charge of the Bibliothèque de Genève’s digital policy, and Hoang-Quan Nguyen, the senior IT project manager at the Direction des systèmes d’information et de communication of the City of Geneva.

The digital catalogue

A discussion was initiated within the Bibliothèque de Genève to decide the form the future digital catalogue should take and define the scope and functionalities of the desired product. The publication software should allow users to manage a subset of the Bibliothèque’s collections while also connecting that subset to the description of similar items conserved by outside institutions or private owners, and publishing the catalogue’s entries with scholarly texts able to contextualize the works described. The decision was made to integrate the digital catalogue with the collections database of the Centre d’iconographie (the MuseumPlusRIA software package). This integration would make it possible to tap the metadata already available in the database and add to that data by drawing on the scholarly findings eventually generated. Work on the project benefitted from the complete redesign of the web portal for the collections of the Musée d’art et d’histoire in 2019, which concerns all of the city’s museums.

The catalogue of Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s work in photography

The Centre d’iconographie aims to publish all existing data on each item that is identified as belonging to the “Eynard” corpus. Collecting information to this end depends though on the conditions of our access to pieces that do not belong to the Bibliothèque de Genève, conditions that are occasionally limited. Priority was therefore given to research carried out on the items found in the library’s own collections. We plan to regularly update the entries in the future as new information becomes available.

The way of classifying items we eventually decided on is borrowed from genre painting. Indeed, the influence the art of his day had on his work – Eynard was a collector himself – seemed decisive to us. The daguerreotypes are therefore grouped according to a typology (self-portrait, double portrait, group portrait, landscape, etc.) that made the most sense to us while offering the greatest potential for comparison to anyone consulting the whole of the catalogue. The possibilities in this database allow anyone the chance to reshuffle the cards as they see fit.

Any written indications on the images, much of which is not autographic (not in Eynard’s hand) but does contain precious information, have been systematically recorded. Information on the materials has been noted, too, when available. Gathering data as seemingly simple as the dimensions of the daguerreotype plates proved difficult in fact, for the pieces are often hidden by the display casing. This information has been estimated from measurements of the mountings and windows. These approximations don’t always allow us to determine for certain the format of the plate that was used, which may have slight variations, moreover, according to the manufacturer (full plate, half-plate, quarter-plate, etc.).

The main part of the work, the part for which the Bibliothèque de Genève was best able to provide information to the research community, was focused on identifying the people depicted and the locations of the shots. This information plays a major role in the works’ attribution, dating, and interpretation.

The main question in creating a catalogue like the catalogue raisonné of Eynard’s photography is indeed attribution. In Eynard’s case, attribution has been made easier by the fact that the corpus has suffered little scattering; three-quarters of the pieces belong to just two institutions today, the Bibliothèque de Genève and the J. Paul Getty Museum. While Eynard’s output was abundant, the sites and subjects he photographed are relatively few and easily identifiable. Eynard, moreover, customarily figures in most of the photographs he took and very often he included the same accessories in his shots.

Our study led to questioning certain attributions that had been usually admitted. In effect, Genevan daguerreotype photography was long limited to Eynard’s activity in the medium and a good number of pieces were attributed to the Genevan pioneer that were not necessarily his work. The output, whether professional or amateur, was far more diversified in fact, starting in the early 1840s, in Geneva as elsewhere in Switzerland. Furthermore, the study was able to show that part of the portraits of Jean-Gabriel Eynard were not self-portraits but in fact photographs taken by professional studios at his demand.

A textbook case: the portraits of Henry Dunant

Let’s take as an example the three plates of the young Henry Dunant which are traditionally attributed to Jean-Gabriel Eynard. This lot comprises a genre scene (84.XT.255.45), a group portrait (DESN 11), and an individual portrait (DESN 14); the latter depicts the future founder of the Red Cross looking no more than thirty years old, which is confirmed by an inscription added sometime after the daguerreotype was taken. It states that he is between twenty-five and twenty-six years old, which would situate the realization of the daguerreotype around 1853-1854, still within Eynard’s lifetime. The provenance of the piece is well documented and guarantees the identification of the subject, were it necessary, and probably its dating. It passed directly from Henry Dunant to his nephew Maurice, legatee of his private records and the awards he had received. Maurice’s wife, Jeanne Dunant, later donated it to the Bibliothèque de Genève.[2]

But what about the identity of the person who took this daguerreotype? The mediocre technical quality of the piece and the very conventional pose suggest the work of an amateur or a less reputable studio. And not one iconographic or topographic element to shore up the attribution to Eynard. Comparison with two other daguerreotypes that show Henry Dunant in Beaulieu three or four years earlier and whose attribution is beyond all doubt settles the question decisively (DESN 11 and 84.XT.255.45).

A too-ready attribution to Eynard of daguerreotypes of Genevan provenance is quite common. It is also likely that families have brought together in their collections daguerreotypes of various provenances, although it is rare that the mix, as in the case described above, can be documented. Maurice Dunant associated the portrait of Henry Dunant with another piece depicting his uncle that he had been given in 1928 by Henri Le Fort, the husband of Hélène Diodati, a direct descendant of Eynard. That plate is authentic (DESN 11). These two items do have different histories, however. Without question the second image was done the same day as a genre scene that is in the same spirit as those Eynard was fond of especially in the 1850s (84.XT.255.45).

The limits of interpretations based on identifying people and places

In most cases, existing documentation does not justify such precise conclusions. Nevertheless, studying the corpus of daguerreotypes by Jean-Gabriel Eynard has made it possible to question the attribution of plates on which he or his close friends and family are depicted. The portrait of the Beaumont-Appia couple, for instance, dated to 1840-1841 and attributed to the Genevan daguerreotypist Louis Bonijol, as indicated in a handwritten note on the reverse (dl 03), proves that the above scenario was indeed a reality. The image that was produced is admittedly disappointing but it constitutes a valuable token of photography’s roots in Switzerland. The plate attests that photographers other than the master of the house were able to work on his property and photograph his family, two clues that are traditionally considered in attributing to him this or that piece. It is possible that these situations were indeed more frequent than the present catalogue allows us to suppose, but evidence is lacking at times.

In the wake of Nicolas Crispini’s work then, there are grounds to suspect that Eynard himself employed the services of professional photographers. Ernest Mayer, who presided alone until he joined forces with his brother in 1850, probably realized five portraits of Eynard, which display an extremely delicate coloring of the plate, a specialty of this Parisian studio. This attribution is confirmed by the presence of an identical rug on one of these pieces (84.XT.255.42) and a daguerreotype from the Mayer studio that is conserved in the Bibliothèque de Genève (D 009). The same observation holds for three photographs conserved by Eynard’s granddaughter Hilda and her (future) spouse, Aloys Diodati. They were probably taken before the celebration of their marriage on 6 September 1853. As with the preceding pieces, none of the characteristic features of Eynard’s work is seen in them; it is known, furthermore, that he showed little interest in doing individual portraits. In that case, the solemnity of the event probably encouraged the family to tap the know-how of a professional who has not yet been identified. That is at least the hypothesis we propose.

What part did Eynard play in realizing such images? We can imagine that he had a hand in their composition or brought along accessories such as a daguerreotype. If we admit such a hypothesis, a very fine piece like the one in which he displays a daguerreotype of Quai des Bergues in Geneva (84.XT.255.42), which we continue to attribute to him, could be the work of another photographer. It is even conceivable that he asked a studio like the Mayers’ to colorize his own plates. The documentation to date is insufficient to answer such questions.

For pieces that play such a decisive role in the history of photography in its earliest years, especially in Switzerland, dating is of capital importance, even if the range of dates is very brief, some fifteen years only, between 1840 and 1855.[3] While Eynard’s start in photography is well documented, notably by several written accounts, the same cannot be said for the end of his output. Determining this late period involved examining datable plates based on reliable criteria, particularly his stereoscopic pieces. Indeed, the appearance of the latter in Eynard’s output in September 1852, the very year a patent protecting the process was taken out in France, offers a reliable milestone. Nearly ninety pieces can be precisely dated and provide us with a good idea of the Genevan photographer’s late work. No stereoscopic plate that an inscription or iconographic clue allows us to date comes after 1855. The last two daguerreotypes that can be attributed to Eynard bear an autographic indication dating them to 10 September 1855; they are a quarter-plate (2013 001 dag 116) and a stereoscopy (2013 001 dag 114). The year 1855 is now seen as the last for Eynard’s activity as a daguerreotypist, even if it is not impossible that he continued working in the medium for some time after that.

The change introduced in daguerreotype casing with the commercialization around 1846 of a protective glass painted in black provides another technical benchmark for dating Eynard’s plates. He seems to have quickly adopted this new display; at any rate, he stopped displaying his daguerreotypes in an “ordinary” light-colored framing mat around 1848, with a few very rare exceptions. Analysis has shown that his enthusiasm for the qualities of this new fashion drove him to reframe older pieces, even ones prior to 1846, a circumstance that invalidates in part this criterion for dating his works. Other characteristic techniques associated with the quality of the shot, luminosity, or focal length offer additional clues but hardly any certainty.

Our research also took advantage of historical data. A few daguerreotypes are mentioned in written sources, although identification isn’t always possible; often the pieces mentioned have not been conserved, as is the case of the portraits of Louis-Philippe I and his family. Written indications on the back of pieces constitute a major source of information but they need to be subjected to critical analysis since they are often neither autographic nor contemporary with the daguerreotype when it was taken. Other indications are furnished by iconographic information. The places that served as settings for the images provide few points of reference in reality, except when newly constructed buildings are seen, as with the Beaulieu aviary (1847). On the other hand, identification of the people who figure in the photographs and the key dates from their biography (marriage, death) are especially useful. The presence of many children in the images, particularly when they are very young, has furnished valuable indications, considered reliable when it was possible to determine the birth year and to compare the portraits of the same boys and girls at different ages. The case of Hilda, Eynard’s granddaughter, is emblematic since she was photographed between the ages of five and eighteen, when she married Aloys Diodati; she is seen growing up as if the daguerreotypes depicting her had been brought together in a family album.

Since uncertainty is a given, we decided that in this catalogue we would not systematically question the attribution of a daguerreotype if no persuasive clue made it possible to form a precise idea of its history. These questions are discussed in the descriptions that accompany quite a few of the pieces. Doubts are expressed in the catalogue by the indication “uncertain attribution,” while the pieces that are no longer deemed to be Eynard’s work are designated as “former attribution.” They are collected at the end of the catalogue so that scholars can continue the debate about them.

An initial conclusion

The aim of a catalogue like ours is to make available to researchers, collectors, and the public a corpus of works previously scattered and hence hard to access. The daguerreotypes are accompanied by information that will enable users to interpret them correctly; the collection databases, whose indications are succinct by necessity, do not generally offer such information. Putting together this catalogue constitutes an essential step that, in time, should allow us to situate Eynard’s works in their rightful place in the history of European photography.

The network that the digital catalogue creates with the other collections at the Centre d’iconographie, and soon with those of other institutions, will open up new avenues of research, we hope. The four texts accompanying the digital catalogue – on the roles played by architecture and clothing, on Eynard’s importance within the context of early photography in French-speaking Switzerland, and finally on his photographic practice – are examples of what a body of works like the photographs of Jean-Gabriel Eynard can add to our knowledge. The odds are good that they will be followed by many other studies in the years to come.