The origins of colour photography

Abstract

The visual comparison between a slightly enlarged autochrome and a pointillist painting is formally very striking, but it is dangerous to base an argument on this comparison, as it is in fact quite anachronistic: indeed Seurat's La Grande Jatte was shown at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1886, while the autochrome process, with first results presented in 1904, was put on the market only in 1907. Nevertheless it is essential to study more carefully the documentary evidence, going back to the beginnings of colour photography, a period of nearly 40 years, starting in 1869 when the ‘solution to the problem’ was proposed independently by Charles Cros (1842-1888) and Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837–1920).¹