The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Bulletin

Henri Le Secq (Jean-Louis-Henri Le Secq Destournelles)
French, 18i 8-i88z
Large Figures on the North Porch, Chartres Cathedral
I85z
Page from an album
Salted paper print from paper negative
127/8 x 8%/6 in. (3z.7 x zz2. cm)
Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation and Harriette
and Noel Levine Gifts, Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Bequest, and
Rogers Fund, i990
1990.1130
Seen obliquely from the eye level of a cathedral visitor, the
portal sculptures in Henri Le Secq's photograph appear disengaged
from their stone support. The figures' corporeality is
enhanced and animated by sharp focus and by their position
between shadowed columns and a blur of moving foliage.
Le Secq's exhaustive documentation of various French cathedrals
in 1851 and 1852 won him critical praise and government
support, not only because his photographs demonstrated the
nascent medium's ability to provide historians and antiquarians
with an extraordinarily detailed, accurate, and extensive
record but also because they were essays in art. Large Figures
on the North Porch is an eloquent poem about the passage of
time and the life of art, ideas resonant in an age that clung to
Romantic notions of the fragment and the ruin even while
embarking on the systematic cataloguing, archaeological investigation,
and restoration of the nation's architectural
patrimony. It was precisely this melding of the personal and
the objective in architectural photography that made Henri
Le Secq-painter, man of learning, and collector of Old Master
prints and medieval ironwork-a central figure in the small
cadre of French photographers who pioneered the aesthetics of
the medium.
MRD
Ex coll.: Album of sixty photographs by Henri Le Secq, The Newberry
Library, Chicago (bought from Elison, Flersheim & Company, Chicago,
1893); de-accessioned by The Newberry Library, February 14, 1990
(sale, Sotheby's, New York, April 24, I990, no. 6004, lot 5); [Harry
Lunn Ltd., New York (removed from album)].
Related references: Henri de Lacretelle, "Albums photographiques
no. 2-M. Le Secq," La Lumiere (February 9, i853), pp. 29-30; Janet
Buerger, "Le Secq's 'Monuments' and the Chartres Cathedral Portfolio,"
Image, 23, no. i (June 198 ), pp. I-5; Eugenia Parry Janis and
Josiane Sartre, Henri Le Secq; Photographe de i850 a I860: Catalogue
raisonne de la Collection de la Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs,
Paris, Paris, i986, pp. 9-I5, cat. nos. 248-290.
5I