Antoine Fauchery

Antoine Julien Nicolas Fauchery (15 November 1823 – 1861) was a French adventurer, writer and photographer with republican sympathies. He participated in the national uprising in Poland in 1848 (Greater Poland Uprising), opened a photographic studio in Melbourne, Australia, in 1858, and was commissioned to accompany the French forces as they progressed to Beijing during the last stage of the Second Opium War in 1860. He wrote thirteen long dispatches from the front-line for le Moniteur, the official French government newspaper. He died in Yokohama of dysentery.

Early life and interests Antoine Fauchery was born in Paris, France, the son of Julien Fauchery, a merchant, and his wife Sophie Gilberte Soré (other sources have 'Soret'). Fauchery's initial interests were in architecture, painting and engraving.

Writing and adventuring Due to a fortunate meeting in café in 1844 with the poet Théodore de Banville, Fauchery began to develop as a writer. He became part of the Bohemian circle that included writers Henri Murger, Champfleury, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval and Théodore Barrière and contributed articles to the journal, Le Corsaire-Satan, along with the rest of that circle. That portrayal was later to inspire French artist Mirka Mora to migrate to Melbourne. Between 1848 and 1852, Fauchery produced a number of pamphlets, serials and short plays, which were published in journals such as Le Corsaire, Journal pour Rire, Dix Décembre and L'Evénement. and he spent the better part of the next four years in Australia. On his return to Melbourne, he established Café Estaminet Français at 76 Little Bourke Street in Melbourne to serve Europeans in the colony, who could meet and play billiards there. Later in an unsuccessful venture, at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris. and provided an account of day-to-day life and the society of the goldfields. and he set up a commercial photography studio at 132 Collins Street, Melbourne. In February of the same year, he won a gold medal for 'various portraits on paper, from collodion negatives' at an exhibition held by the Victorian Industrial Society. As a working photographer, in November 1858 he photographed the Melbourne division of the Volunteer Artillery Regiment and the A and B troops of the mounted force as they went about their artillery practice and manoeuvres in the parkland adjoining the Princes Bridge barracks.

Sun pictures of Victoria

The album Sun pictures of Victoria comprised photographic prints of Melbourne, the Victorian goldfields and Aboriginal Australians that Fauchery made with photographer Richard Daintree that are among the only existing images of the goldfields and Australian Aboriginal Peoples from this time. The Argus advertised in 1858 the publication in ten instalments under this title to a total of; "50 large photographs, in illustration of our colonial celebrities, our landscape and marine scenery, and our private and public architecture. The invention of the stereomonoscope, by means of which the objects exhibited in a sun picture, of any size, assume solidity and relief to the eye of the spectator, gives an additional value to photographic transcripts of nature." Jack Cato in his The Story of the Camera in Australia in his inspection of a copy of Sun Pictures sold by a relative of John Pascoe Fawkner to the State Library of Victoria, deciphered what was meant by the misleading term 'stereomonoscope;' these were not stereograms but "proved to be taken with a Petvzal lens (designed by Viennese scientist) which gave sharp focus to the subject and a diffused focus to the background from which the subject appeared to stand forward, in relief. This lens had been used only for groups and simple figures. [Fauchery's] city views were sharp all over."

Final travels and death In February 1859, disillusioned with that city, Fauchery became ill while in China and died in Yokohama, Japan, probably of gastritis and dysentery, on 27 April 1861. He was buried in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Amours d'un Petit Bossu et d'une Magdeleine en Bois Une Histoire de l'ami Jacques Conte de Jour de l'an

Plays

Fauchery, A. and Barrière, T. Caline, charge d'atelier [play staged 12 March 1856] Fauchery, A. and Murger, H. La Résurrection de Lazare (Paris: Michael Lévy, 1856)

Published letters

Fauchery, A. Lettres d'un miner en Australie [serialised in Le moniteur universel 9 January-8 February 1857) and published Poulet Malassis et de Broise, Paris, 1857. Fauchery, A. Lettres d'Chine [serialised in Le moniteur universel 12 October 1860 – 3 February 1861)

Photographs

Fauchery, A. and Daintree, R. Australia (1858) (known as 'the Sun Pictures of Victoria') [photographic views and studies]