Primitive 19th century photography

The Duke of Aumale was related to most of the crowned heads of Europe: the royal families of England, Naples, Spain, and the imperial family of Austria, etc. As a result, he kept family portraits, many of which date back to the primitive photography period. 

The museum houses an early reproduction or aristotype of the image, which bears a tribute to Claudet and a date: 1848 in Claremont, written in the handwriting of Gustave Macon, the Duke of Aumale's secretary.

Queen Victoria noted in her diary that it did indeed take two hours "because Caldesi photographed us all". 

In the Duke of Aumale's collection, there are many landscapes, with photographs of both the sea and of snow-capped mountains. These prints particularly illustrate the craze for hiking and mountaineering among noble and bourgeois circles of the 19th century. There are also urban and architectural shots, particularly of Paris in the 1850s. Photographed in the midst of transformation, Paris is a city to which the duke can no longer have access, owing to the exile of his family.

Baldus is known for his depictions of French architecture and landscapes.


Here, he captures the Tuileries, the official residence of Louis-Philippe—and thus of the Duke of Aumale—before the revolution of 1848, from Napoleon's courtyard, where the Louvre pyramid now stands.

This view of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, was taken before the buildings in the foreground were torn down in the 1860s.

Within the Duke's collection, there are also many landscapes, both photographs of the sea and of snow-capped mountains. These prints illustrate in particular the enthusiasm for hiking and mountaineering in the noble and bourgeois circles of the 19th century.

A great pioneer of photography, Gustave Le Gray produced one of the first shots in which we simultaneously see the movement of the sea and the clouds in the sky. He obtained this image by juxtaposing landscapes from paper negatives and skies from glass negatives.

Snowy mountain views were very fashionable in the 1860's and became a genre within the emerging photography scene. The most famous artists in this genre were the Bisson brothers and Adolphe Braun, of whom the Condé Museum preserves several large views of the Swiss Alps that are typical of this movement.

The Duke of Aumale owns many reproductions of works of art. These are often shots dedicated to the study of his collections, capturing his personal treasures or the works of his favorite artists. 

This photograph shows the statue of Moses sculpted by Michelangelo, created around 1513-1515, integrated into the tomb of Julius II in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome.

These three figures in Sèvres bisque porcelain by sculptor Jean-Baptiste Jules Klagmann (1810-1867) represent The Word (1851-1853), Science (1851) and Scripture (1853), according to the research of Tamara Préaud, former archivist of the Sèvres porcelain factory.

The Duke of Aumale defines himself as a soldier, so the first war reports were of interest to him. Here, Roger Fenton (1819-1869) created a report for Queen Victoria, the Duke of Aumale's cousin, on the siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War (1854-1855).

Louis Ducos du Hauron can be considered a pioneer of color photography. He submitted his discovery to the Société Française de la Photographie (SFP) on May 7, 1869, the same day as Charles Cros.

The Duke of Aumale acquired this unpublished color photograph, taken in 1878 of a painting by Jean-Marie Nattier depicting his great-grandfather, the young Duke of Penthièvre, with ships in the background recalling his position as Admiral of France.