Adolphe Braun

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. 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. In 1867, Braun used the new carbon method to create a series of large-format hunting scenes entitled, Panoplies de gibier.

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. 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. 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.

Albums

Fleurs photographiées (1855) L’Alsace photographiée (1859) Vues d'Alsace (1860) Costumes de Suisse (1869)

Gallery