Antonin Personnaz

Antonin Personnaz (1854 – 31 December 1936) was a French art collector and early colour photographer.

Early life Antonin Personnaz was born in 1854 (1855, according to James)

Art collector Personnaz was a lover of art and a friend and patron of painters. In 1878, at age 23, Personnaz moved with his family to 4 rue Sainte-Cécile, Paris, where he was employed in his father's business 'Personnaz and Gardin', later becoming a partner, an occupation he regarded as secondary to, and supporting, his interest in art. In 1880 his first Modern acquisition was an Ironers pastel which he purchased direct from its artist Edgar Degas, for only 20 francs at time when the dealer was finding few buyers for impressionist works. paintings collected by Personnaz form the third floor of the Musee Bonnat collection He first exhibited such pictures, made in Madrid, by projection at the S.F.P. that year (the process produced transparencies, not prints). Personnaz believed that the colour image, when projected and enlarged on a screen to a scale similar to that of a painting, its atmospheric depth is enhanced. and which also related to Pointillism, Georges Seurat's theory of optical mixture of pigments, adopted by Pissarro in the 1880s.

Such aesthetic qualities Personnaz ardently defended as “autochromie artistique", rural landscapes of the Val-de-Seine and Auvers sur Oise on the outskirts of Paris, where Personnaz moved in 1885 to be nearer the artistic community. He photographed peasant scenes, haystacks, river views, women with umbrellas, flowering apple trees, fields strewn with poppies and the painters themselves at work. The majority of his images were taken there, and later in the Basque Country, Creuse and the Mediterranean Coast. |author=|title=|source=

Technique To overcome the limited exposure latitude of the medium, he achieved saturated colour in both subjects and background sky (which normally overexposed) by shooting with the sun directly on his subject, angled obliquely as it is in early morning or late afternoon. To render clouds, during the long exposures required by the Autochrome plate, he waved black card in front of the lens to cut back the brightness of the sky. Preferring to work in shades of grey or in rainy weather, in one instance he records himself photographing haystacks in the snow and fog, His writings discuss the relationship between painting and photography and he gave lectures on the same theme in France and abroad, and presented the conference Concerning Art Processes in Photography in 1907. In 1910 he wrote on the impressionistic effects of Autochrome.

Later life and legacy Personnaz retired in 1919 to 22 rue Lormand in Bayonne, overlooking the Adour river beyond the classical symmetry of the Jardin Leon Bonnat, with its fountain and bronze bust of the artist, and 500 metres from the Musée Bonnat. There he continued his association with learned societies and devoted himself to the development of the museum, and on the death of Léon Bonnat, wrote tributes to him and literature on his art. In 1931 he loaned Le Pont d'Argenteuil to the Claude Monet retrospective at the Orangerie des Tuileries. He continued to make numerous artistic and documentary autochromes of the Basque country, then a remote corner of France. In 1947 she made a further donation of 44 paintings to the Bonnat museum, under the control of the national museums. Since 1986 the Personnaz collection has been administered by the Musée d’Orsay. Of note is that his Claude Monet, Le Pont d'Argenteuil was damaged in an act of vandalism in 2007.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen dedicated an exhibition to him as part of the Normandy Impressionist Festival 2020.

A portrait bust of Personnaz by Paul Paulin is held in the Musée d'Orsay.

Publications Personnaz, Antonin, Paris, H. Laurens, 1925 Personnaz, Antonin (1903) article in Revue de Photographie Personnaz, Antonin (1904) article in Bulletin de S.F.P. Personnaz, Antonin, (1905) article in Revue de Photographie Personnaz, Antonin, (1906) article in Bulletin de S.F.P. Personnaz, A., & Musée Bonnat. (1930). Catalogue sommaire: Antiquités égyptiennes, grecques et romaines, sculptures, tableaux et objets d'art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes.

Exhibitions 1903: Salon Photo-Club, Paris 1904: Salon Photo-Club, Paris 1905: Salon Photo-Club, Paris 1906: Salon Photo-Club, Paris 1907: Salon Photo-Club, Paris 1908: Salon Photo-Club, Paris 1996/7: Work included in La couleur sensible: photographies autochromes, 1907-1935, Centre de la Vieille Charité, 19 December–16 February 2020: Antonin Personnaz (1854-1936), Impressionist Photographer, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, 11 July - 15 November Impressionist Photographer11 July - 15 November