This unique paper negative depicts one of Humbert de Molard's most celebrated subjects.

Frizot remarks upon Humbert de Molard's great liberty in being able to emply people or inanimate objects interchangeably to gain the desired atmospheric effect. Pervading de Molard's photography of this period is a concern with the countryside and rustic domestic life that comes close to genre scene, and which the inanimate object frequently takes centre stage. Two such examples Frizot cites are La Lessive (1851) and L'Ecossage des Haricots (1851), in each of which the scene is punctuated by objects, 'les signes de la vie campagnarde."

Often as in the present work, Humbert de Molard posed his caretaker Louis Dodier (standing in elegant contraposto, wearing wood clogs) and other workers in a tableau of rural activity at his chateau at Argentelle in Normandy.

The National Gallery of Art, Washington has a relative negative. A print from this negative is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and assigned a date of 1851.

In their catalogue entry on this work they record the following:

Humbert de Molard, freed from financial concerns by the wealth of his landholdings in Normandy and perhaps missing the activity of Paris as he settled in the provincial town of Lagny, took up photography in 1843, just four years after its invention. A clever chemist and skilled craftsman, he quickly mastered the new medium of daguerreotypy and experimented with paper photography by the late 1840s.

Clearly attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and its early-nineteenth-century French revival, the wealthy baron and gentleman farmer Humbert de Molard posed his wife, daughter, caretaker, and workers in tableaux of rural life at his chat Argentelle, in Normandy. Among the medium's pioneers in France, having taken up photography in 1843, Humbert de Molard exhibited this triptych at the 1856 Brussels Photographic Exposition as proof that he had made fast exposures and permanent prints even in 1850, when few practiced the art of photography on paper.

Humbert de Molard, freed from financial concerns by the wealth of his landholdings in Normandy and perhaps missing the activity of Paris as he settled in the provincial town of Lagny, took up photography in 1843, just four years after its invention. A clever chemist and skilled craftsman, he quickly mastered the new medium of daguerreotypy and experimented with paper photography by the late 1840s.