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Clément Marot Baldus, Edouard  (French, 1813-1889)

From the text of the volume, "we have chosen the portrait which decorates the title to try a new mode of reproduction which had not yet been tried, and which seemed to us called to give wonderful results; it is a combination of photographic etching and paniconography… we [made] a copper engraving on steel; it was turned overnight into a plate in relief, which took place of a woodcut. This time, we wanted to use the admirable discovery due to M. Niepce de Saint-Victor, the heliographic engraving, and manage to put in press a truly autographic facsimile, for which the sun and the chemical agents alone would have done the service of the engraver. Such is the facsimile of original engraving (unfortunately a little used) that one has under the eyes. One of the most skilled photographers of Paris, M. Baldus gave us the copper plank on which he had fixed the deep tracing, and at the end of twenty-four hours M. Gillot gave us a relief report of this tracing on zinc. The lines we draw here will, in a few hours, be typographically composed, and framed in this assemblage of characters, the product of light rays, thus brought to the state of a plate, will go to press and multiply to infinity its images. The fine specimens which have appeared from the application of the invention of M. Niepce de Saint-Victor to various objects of natural history are known (Chalcophotographie zoologique, four deliveries published by Messrs. Rousseau and Deveria). We have tried to take this application a step further, by extending it to typography, and, since it seems permissible, to translate into French our modern industrial innovations, to combine and accumulate Greek syllables indefinitely, we wanted to try a test of what can be called PANICONOPHOTOTYPOGRAPHIE" [1]

Reproduced / Exhibited

Kate Addleman-Frankel, After Photograhy? The Photogravures of Edouard Baldus Reconsidered, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2018, fig. 9. pg 20
Mr. Jan Adriaan van Eijk en de vroege Nederlandse fotografie en fotolithografie. Zijn publicaties in het tijdschrift De Volksvlijt (1855 -1878).p. 19.

References

[1] Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français : documents historiques inédits et originaux, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: SHPF Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1854. p. 417