Photographie Lunaire: Copernic-Képler-Aristarique (1896): Art, History and Details

Photographie Lunaire: Copernic-Képler-Aristarique (1896) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Maurice Loewy (French, 1833–1907); Pierre Henri Puiseaux (French, 1855–1928).

The work and its context

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

This plate is from a deluxe 12-volume atlas of the moon created by astronomers Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseaux. The atlas remained the most accurate reference of the moon’s surface until the age of space travel. The duo captured thousands of images at the Paris Observatory through a telescope that Loewy invented. It was equipped with a mechanism that tracked the moon’s movements during the exposures. Given weather conditions, they were only able to photograph 50 to 60 nights per year; the project thus took 15 years to complete and contained nearly 100 large-scale photogravures.

Object facts

• Title: Photographie Lunaire: Copernic-Képler-Aristarique
• Date: 1896
• Creator attribution: Maurice Loewy (French, 1833–1907); Pierre Henri Puiseaux (French, 1855–1928)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: photogravure (heliogravure)
• Dimensions: Sheet: 57 x 47.7 cm (22 7/16 x 18 3/4 in.); Framed: 88.6 x 77.3 x 2.6 cm (34 7/8 x 30 7/16 x 1 in.); Matted: 86.4 x 76.2 cm (34 x 30 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2011.172

Collection credit

Gift of Amy and Neil Viny

Further reading listed by the museum

• Levy, Benjamin. “Photographs in Ink: The wonder of photomechanical processes.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine vol. 62, no. 3 (September 2022): 12-15.

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.