Giuseppe Primoli was an Italian nobleman, collector, and photographer.
Background
Giuseppe Primoli was born in Rome, 2 May 1851. His parents were Pietro Primoli, Count of Foglia (1820–1883) and Charlotte Bonaparte ('Carlotta', 4 March 1832 – 10 September 1901). His maternal grandparents were Charles Lucien Bonaparte and Zénaïde Bonaparte.
Career
Giuseppe Primoli lived in Paris from 1853 to 1870. He befriended writers and artists both in Italy and France and was host to Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Alexandre Dumas fils, Sarah Bernhardt, and others in Palazzo Primoli in Rome. In 1901 he became the sole owner of the palazzo, which he enlarged and modernized between 1904 and 1911.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Primoli, an avid photographer, produced over 10,000 photographs. His most productive period was 1888-1894. For the most part, he used a casual snapshot approach with his Kinegraphe camera, although he sometimes took formal portraits. His brother Luigi left him his photographic archive when he died in 1925.
Giuseppe Primoli died 13 June 1927 in Rome, leaving his collections and Palazzo Primoli to a foundation, the Fondazione Primoli, while the Museo Napoleonico was sold to the city of Rome.
Personality
Giuseppe Primoli was a bibliophile and collector, who assembled a large collection of books and prints. He amassed a collection of books by Stendhal as well as many from the writer's library.
Quotes from others about the person
According to A.D. Coleman, in The New York Times: "Primoli can perhaps be best described as a cross between Eugene Atget and J.H. Lartigue. Like Atget, he was an insatiable recorder of all aspects of the life around him. . . . With Lartigue, Primoli shares a delightful lack of self-consciousness about his work, a frequent family-album atmosphere, and a celebrity-hound nature whose innocence is its saving grace."
Coleman says of the 12,575 surviving prints taken between 1888 and 1905: "Their interest is not just their value as historic documents, but the grace and sensitivity with which Primoli saw and recorded the people and events of his time, and the spontaneity and freshness of his seeing."