Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Two Women) (c. 1880s): Art, History and Details

Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Two Women) (c. 1880s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Félix Bonfils (French, 1831–1885).

The work and its context

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

To make a photochrom, a photographic negative was transferred onto a lithographic stone, then printers created a minimum of six and up to fifteen different stones, each with a single color of ink, which were printed atop the black-and-white image. The printers creating the colors had never seen the original locale. Photochroms were popular from the 1890s into the 1910s and were most often collected in albums or framed and hung on the wall.

Object facts

• Title: Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Two Women)
• Date: c. 1880s
• Creator attribution: Félix Bonfils (French, 1831–1885)
• Culture: France
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: Photochrom
• Dimensions: Image: 22.4 x 16.3 cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/16 in.); Mounted: 26.6 x 18.1 cm (10 1/2 x 7 1/8 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2021.208.b

A detail from the museum

In the early 1880s, Félix Bonfils was among the first photographers to use the Photocrom process, which produced color images from a single black-and-white negative.

Collection credit

Gift of William and Margaret Lipscomb

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.