Henriette Robert

Henriette Robert, daughter of the distinguished amateur photographer of this portrait, is seated on a stone balustrade in the garden of the manufactory at Sèvres, where her father spent his entire professional career in various positions of authority from 1839 to 1879. Throughout his working career, however, Robert devoted much passion and energy to his interest in photography. One of his earliest themes was portraiture, embodied in a small, remarkable group of intimate views of his family and his fellow artists at Sèvres. In this spare composition, Robert posed his daughter in a contemplative manner, holding a book and deliberately looking into the camera's lens. This beautiful portrait of Henriette is distinquished by its intensity and its allusion to her personality.