In most cases thus far, the set of four glass plates was easily removed from the paper jacket and separated. Upon examination it was determined that the plates were generally in very good condition. In every case all four separation plates were in a single jacket. The glass plates were still in the original brown kraft jackets from the Bourges-Bruehl studio. The collection was in 55 cartons requiring approximately 55 cubic feet of storage. In 1986 the collection was transferred to the Institution's Office of Printing and Photographic Services. Because of the subject matter, they were donated to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art in 1981. However, the Bourges four-color separation plates were the only significant component of the gift not related to the Eastman House's collections policy. Following Sipley's death, the museum's entire collection was purchased by the 3M Company, which gave it to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography in 1977. On his retirement, Bourges presented the collection to Louis Sipley's American Museum of Photography in Philadelphia. Publication credits extend through 1953.Īrtists represented in the collection include Van Gogh, Van Dyck, Vermeer, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Winslow Homer, John Trumbull, John Sloan, Renoir, Rembrandt, Picasso, and others too numerous to list. While the vast majority of these separations were published in Life, credits are also listed for Time, Harpers, Fortune, Vanity Fair, New York World, Art Treasures, and others. This is the work contained in the Smithsonian's Bourges-Bruehl Collection. It was the technician Bourges who also enjoyed photographing paintings for Life, probably beginning in 1936. During this time, their commercial accounts included most of the largest advertisers in the country. The cover of Color Sells, a 1935 Condé Nast publication, shows the pair shooting an illustration for a Cannon towel advertisement. Together they produced 195 editorial pages for the Condé Nast organization through the Depression years of 1932–34, including photographs for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden. Bourges remained the technician, at one point constructing an 8″ × 10″ one-shot camera to expose all the separation plates simultaneously. Among the earliest commercial color photographers, Bourges was making color images for advertisers in the late 1920's.īourges and his partner, Anton Bruehl, made color history with the issue of Vogue by publishing a color photograph of fruit and silver, “which in composition, color values, and use of light and shadows equalled anything published before and which today ranks with the finest contemporary work.” īruehl, described as “the master of composition and stagecraft,” was responsible for arranging and lighting still-life subjects. His brother, Albert, specialized in the photo-mechanical field, but Fernand became an innovator in technical photography. Fernand Bourges has been described as “one of the great technical photographers produced during the first half of the 20th Century.” As a young man he worked in New York as a photo-engraver. The separations are the product of the Bourges-Bruehl studio. The collection dates from approximately 1936 through 1953. Each set comprises four black-and-white 8″ × 10″ dry gelatin glass-plate negatives, representing the yellow, magenta, cyan, and black components of the image. The Bourges-Bruehl Collection contains approximately 1,500 sets of four-color separations created primarily for Life magazine from paintings and drawings. The condition of the collection, its cataloguing and storage, and the use of the plates to recreate full-color images for research purposes is discussed. Each set of these separations consists of four 8″ × 10″ dry gelatin glass plates, corresponding to the yellow, magenta, cyan, and black plates used in the printing process. 1-13) The Bourges-Bruehl Collection: Reproducing Color from Glass Separation Negatives by Jim Wallace, Joe Goulait, and Hugh Talman Printing and Photographic Services, Smithsonian Institution Abstractįrom the middle 1930's through the early 1950's, the Bourges-Bruehl studio produced more than 1,500 sets of color separation negatives of paintings, drawings, and other works of art for publication in Life magazine. Topics in Photographic Preservation 1991, Volume 4, Article 1 (pp.
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