Antonin Personnaz

Abstract

Antonin Personnaz (1855–1937), French art historian and the second director of the Musee Bonnat in Bayonne, was one of the earliest patrons of the Impressionist painters. The significant bequest of his large collection of Impressionist paintings to the Louvre upon his death in 1937 has assured him an influential place in the history of nineteenth-century French art, acknowledged in the ‘Salle Personnaz’ transferred intact from the Jeu de Paume and now in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.¹ Surprisingly, little is known today of this museum director's own works of art in colour photography. A life-long enthusiast of photography and an active member of the Société française de photographie from 1896.² Personnaz's many experiments in the newly invented art of colour photography resembled the instantaneous quality of the Impressionists in their capture of the transitory effects of nature on to canvas. In the hundreds of early and hitherto virtually unknown autochromes, Personnaz achieved images as lyrical as the paintings of the contemporaries he so much admired and collected.