Exceptionally rare work by Hippolyte Bayard, one of the most important early photographers, a pioneer alongside Daguerre and Fox Talbot. This is a very rare example from one of the inventors of the direct positive process in 1839 from a member of the Mission Heliographique in 1851, along with Baldus, Le Secq, Le Gray and Mestral.


Bayard's early pictures of Montmartre and its windmills are amongst his most famous works. There is, for example, a direct positive print of the subject in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The present photograph probably dates from the early 1840s, although the artist is known to have depicted the Montmartre as early as 1839, and is one of the earliest salt prints to depict Paris. It was made from a paper negative and has a remarkable tonal range and picture quality.

The entry to the Metropolitan Museum catalogue records the following:

"Even before the detailed processes of Talbot and Daguerre were revealed, a third inventor had successfully obtained photographic images using a process of his own creation. Hippolyte Bayard, experimenting in the hours left free from his civil service job, had brought his process from conception to fruition in the short space of a few months early in 1839. Like Daguerre's technique, Bayard's was a direct-positive process; like Talbot's, it produced photographs on paper. Each picture required some thirty minutes of exposure....


... The picturesque windmills of Montmartre, the outlying suburb that was becoming the bohemian quarter of Paris, were a frequent subject of Bayard's earliest photographs, and likely figured in some of the thirty pictures shown by the artist in the first public exhibition of photographs, held in Paris in July 1839. Remembering that occasion a dozen years later, the critic Francis Wey wrote of the exhibited works, "They resembled nothing I had ever seen. "