Portrait (thought to be of Charlotte Spaulding)
autochrome photograph
Edward Steichen, circa 1908
This is almost as good as discovering an unknown Klimt! Two Steichen autochromes (primitive color photographs) were recently donated to the George Eastman House collection of historic photographs. (Story – Sunday’s NYT)
The dreamy palette results from the primitive autochrome process. . . but I wouldn’t mind believing that light was just a different color in the first decades of this century. The last of the Gilded Age dwindling away, and all that.
Another Steichen photograph, The Pond-Moonlight (1904), sold for almost $3 million in 2006, well more than its weight in gold. The Pond-Moonlight is often described as autochrome, but predated Steichen’s adoption of the Lumiere autochrome process, which was not widely available until 1907. The Sotheby’s auction catalog listed it as multiple gum-bichromate print over platinum. (Not that I have any clue what that means.) The Pond-Moonlight was the most expensive photograph ever auctioned – until it was surpassed in 2007 by Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon.