Artist (or Assistant) with Pipe (1853–1857): Art, History and Details

Artist (or Assistant) with Pipe (1853–1857) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Frank Chauvassaignes (French).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Frank Chauvassaignes' portrait is an outstanding example of compositional and technical achievement in early French photography. A handsome young painter, outfitted for work in the studio in a rumpled smock, appears to be caught in a moment of introspection, pipe in hand. The camera's lowered position gives the sitter a dignified air. In this formally balanced portrait, the photographer captured not only the sitter's physical likeness, but also his state of mind. Chauvassaignes, a photographer with a trained and sophisticated eye, lived in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in central France, and was a member of the Société française de photographie. To date, little information has been found about this artist and his small, though remarkable, body of known images

Object facts

• Title: Artist (or Assistant) with Pipe
• Date: 1853–1857
• Creator attribution: Frank Chauvassaignes (French)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salt print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 21 x 15.7 cm (8 1/4 x 6 3/16 in.); Mounted: 30.5 x 23.5 cm (12 x 9 1/4 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1998.174

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “New Cleveland Indian Arrives at the CMA,” November 27, 1998, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.