Robert Demachy was a French artist, writer, and photographer who was a founding member of the Photo-Club de Paris and one of the great users of the gum bichromate and oil processes. As one of the leading French pictorialists he contributed works to "Camera Work."
Background
Léon-Robert Demachy was born in the home of his grandmother in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris, on July 7, 1859, into a wealthy banking family. He spent his formative years cultivating himself in music, painting, and literature, and volunteered for a year in the French army.
Education
Robert was educated in Jesuit schools in Paris, and he became fluent in English by the time he was a teenager. His education also included extensive musical lessons, and he became an accomplished violin player.
Career
In 1882, Robert Demachy joined the Société Française de Photographie, and shortly thereafter was a cofounder of the Photo-Club de Paris, a group devoted exclusively to artistic photography. He served on the editorial committee of the club’s monthly publication and helped organize it first salon of photographic art, in 1894.
The same year, Demachy began using the recently revived gum-bichromate process, a printing method that allowed extensive hand manipulation of the image. Later, he also made Rawlins oil and oil transfer prints. His photographs often pictured nude female subjects handled in a very painterly manner. He wrote extensively on photographic technique and aesthetics, including six books, the first of which, with Alfred Maskell, appeared in 1897 and addressed gum printing. Hundreds of articles by him were published in magazines in France, England, and the United States.
Fluent in English, Demachy maintained correspondence for over ten years with Alfred Stieglitz, who included both articles and images by him in Camera Notes and Camera Work. Stieglitz trusted Demachy’s eye to the extent that he had him select the work for a group exhibition of French photographs that was seen at New York’s Photo-Secession Galleries in 1906.
Demachy enjoyed long lasting visibility in England’s Photograms of the Year. Reproductions of his work appeared every year but once between 1896 and 1916, and during much of this time he also wrote an annual review of pictorial photography in France. English organizations that welcomed him included the Linked Ring Brotherhood, which elected him to membership in 1895, and the Royal Photographic Society, which declared him an honorary fellow ten years later.
Demachy exhibited extensively, beginning by 1892, when some of his photographs were seen at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Paris. Over the next twenty years, his work was included in exhibitions in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Florence, Hamburg, Leeds, New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, Saint Louis, and Vienna. In 1904, he had a solo show at the Royal Photographic Society, in London.
In 1910, Demachy’s images were used to illustrate two fictional travel books by Anna Bowman Dodd. Titled "In and Out of Three Normandy Inns" and "In and Out of a French Country House", they featured his accomplished soft-focus renderings of quant French scenery and people. Shortly thereafter, at the outbreak of World War I, Demachy inexplicably gave up photography for drawing. So in 1929, when "Three Normandy Inns" was republished (in a slightly larger format), it included reproductions of Demachy’s drawings rather than his photographs.
Even after he stopped photographing, Demachy continued to send his work to photographic salons, nearly until his death. Among them were those in New York in 1923 (sponsored by the Pictorial Photographers of America), Paris and London in 1927, and Chicago in 1933 (as part of the Century of Progress Exposition). Robert Demachy died on December 29, 1936, at Hennequeville, and was buried in the family tomb at Père Lachaise, in Paris.
Demachy’s diverse subject matter often reverberated with the impressionistic style and always revealed the hand of their maker. Technically brilliant, especially in gum bichromate printing, Demachy was disdainful of the clarity of detail and the automatic trace of reality of the "straight", unmanipulated print and defended the painterly image.
Quotations:
"A work of art must be a transcription, not a copy of nature… there is not a particle of art in the most beautiful scene of nature. The art is man’s alone, it is subjective not objective."
Membership
In 1882 Demachy was elected to the Société française de photographie, where he interacted with some of the leading photographers in Europe and shortly thereafter was a cofounder of the Photo-Club de Paris. He was also a member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood and was an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Josef Maria Eder says he "brought gum printing to high perfection."
Interests
Artists
Edgar Degas
Connections
In 1889, while visiting the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he met a young woman from Detroit, Michigan, named Julia Adelia Delano. Adelia, as she was called, was a member of the important Delano family in America and a distant relative of future American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Little is known about their courtship, but on May 2, 1893 Robert and Adelia were married in Paris. They lived in the family mansion on Rue François Premier. Their first son, Robert-Charles, was born in 1894, followed by son Jacques François in 1898. Jacques later became a very well known fashion illustrator.
By 1907 Demachy was so absorbed in his photography that he had a separate studio and living quarters for himself in the upper floor of the family mansion. His wife Adelia had her own quarters on the ground floor, and their children were looked after by an Irish nanny. This situation led to increasing resentment by Adelia, since she was surrounded by Demachy’s mother, her in-laws and her children in their mansion yet she rarely saw her husband because of his preoccupation with photography.
In addition, Adelia thoroughly enjoyed the aristocratic culture surrounding the Demachy family. There were many opportunities to attend elegant parties and events, but for the most part Robert detested them. He preferred the company of bohemian painters or the enjoyment of the simple countryside, and he was not comfortable in higher class social circles. Adelia became more and more isolated, and in 1909 she asked for and was granted a divorce. After the divorce, which was considered scandalous at that time, she moved to her own apartment and remarried two years later. It is reported that Demachy never spoke an unkind word about her either while they were married or after their divorce.