Victor Regnault, Louis Robert, and photography at the Manufacture Imperiale de Porcelaine de Sevres, 1845-1865

Victor Regnault (1810--1878) and Louis Robert (1810--1882) were chemists who independently came to the practice of photography in the 1840s. In the 1850s, during the peak of their photographic activity, they were employed together at the imperial porcelain factory at Sevres, where Regnault was the director and Robert was engaged as the head of the painting studio.;Both photographers made large, artistically ambitious landscapes for exhibition, intimate family portraits for private appreciation, and documentary photographs of the factory and its workers. Robert also made photographs of the factory's wares and landscapes for commercial purposes. The flourishing of photography at the Manufacture de Sevres, the most prominent of France's three state-owned factories of decorative arts, represents an important instance of the contested conjunction of art, science and industry, as individual and corporate forces struggled over the direction of the new medium.;Chapter One comprises a review of the recent scholarship and criticism on early French photography and a description of my approach to the material of the dissertation. The second chapter introduces the biographies of Regnault and Robert and traces their photographic careers, with attention given to their individual technical and artistic formation. Chapter Three considers the implications of photography's presence at the manufacture, and the relationship of photography at Sevres to the aims and needs of the Second Empire government. A longstanding internal conflict at the manufacture between traditional artistic handcrafting and new industrial techniques of fabrication is described, which presaged a conflict over the applied use of photography at the factory. This historical debate thus illuminates the situation confronting Regnault and Robert, for despite their efforts, practical applications of photography in the factory were discouraged by the minister of the Emperor. This circumstance is shown to reflect the State's equivocal relationship to technology at the moment of France's crisis as the European leader in decorative arts.;Chapters Four and Five consider the principal subjects of the photographers, work: portraiture and landscape. Chapter Four begins with a brief account of the portrait tradition in painting that was inherited by photographers and discusses the critical framework for "artistic" photographic portraiture that was promulgated in the 1850s in the photographic press. Regnault's portraits---probably the most significant single body of early French calotype portraiture---are analyzed in relation to available visual precedents, technical limits, purpose, and personal intention. The photographers, work in landscape is the subject of Chapter Five. This chapter questions the meaning of pictorial landscape, rendered via an "industrial" medium, at time when the natural landscape was yielding to industrialization especially in suburban environments like that of Sevres.