ca.1895 French photochrom EGYPT: COLOSSI OF MEMNON, THEBES (#31)

Description: Boulanger_031 ca.1895 French photochrom EGYPT: COLOSSI OF MEMNON, THEBES (#31) Photochrom titled Thebes. Colosses de Memnon, page size 32 x 24 cm, image size 21 x 14.5 cm. From: Autour du Monde - Aquarelles - Souvenirs de Voyages, Paris, L. Boulanger, editeur. Memnon, in Greek mythology, son of Tithonus (son of Laomedon, legendary king of Troy) and Eos (Dawn) and king of the Ethiopians. He was a post-Homeric hero, who, after the death of the Trojan warrior Hector, went to assist his uncle Priam, the last king of Troy, against the Greeks. He performed prodigies of valour but was slain by the Greek hero Achilles. According to tradition, Zeus, the king of the gods, was moved by the tears of Eos and bestowed immortality upon Memnon. His companions were changed into birds, called Memnonides, that came every year to fight and lament over his grave. The combat between Achilles and Memnon was often represented by Greek artists, and the story of Memnon was the subject of the lost Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus (fl. c. 650 BC). In Egypt the name of Memnon was connected with the colossal (70-foot [21-metre]) stone statues of Amenhotep III near Thebes, two of which still remain. The more northerly of these was partly destroyed by an earthquake in 27 BC, resulting in a curious phenomenon. Every morning, when the rays of the rising sun touched the statue, it gave forth musical sounds like the twang of a harp string. This was supposed to be the voice of Memnon responding to the greeting of his mother, Eos. After the restoration of the statue by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (AD 170) the sounds ceased; they were attributed to the passage of air through the pores of the stone, caused chiefly by the change of temperature at sunrise. Photochrom Photochrom (also called the Aäc process) prints are colorized images produced from black-and-white photographic negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lithographic printing plates. The process is properly considered a photographic variant of chromolithography, a broader term referring to color lithography in general. History The process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid (1856–1924), an employee of the Swiss company Orell Gessner Füssli, a printing firm with a history extending back into the 16th century. Füssli founded the stock company Photochrom Zürich (later Photoglob Zürich AG) as the business vehicle for the commercial exploitation of the process and both Füssli and Photoglob continue to exist today. From the mid 1890s on the process was licensed by other companies including the Detroit Photographic Company in the US and the Photochrom Company of London. The photochrom process was most popular in the 1890s, when true color photography was first being developed but was still commercially impractical. In 1898 the US Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act which allowed private publishers to produce postcards. These could be mailed for one cent each — the letter rate at the time was two cents. Thousands of photochrom prints, usually of cities or landscapes, were created and sold as postcards and it is in this format that photochrom reproductions became most popular. The Detroit Photographic Company reportedly produced as many as seven million photochrom prints in some years, and ten to thirty thousand different views were offered. After World War One, which brought an end to the craze for collecting Photochrom postcards, the chief use of the process was printing posters and art reproductions, and the last Photochrom printer operated up to 1970. Process A tablet of lithographic limestone, known as a "litho stone," is coated with a light-sensitive coating, comprising a thin layer of purified bitumen dissolved in benzene. A reversed half-tone negative is then pressed against the coating and exposed to daylight for a period of 10 to 30 minutes in summer, up to several hours in winter. The image on the negative allows varying amounts of light to fall on different areas of the coating, causing the bitumen to harden and become resistant to normal solvents in proportion to the amount of light that falls on it. The coating is then washed in turpentine solutions to remove the unhardened bitumen and retouched in the tonal scale of the chosen color to strengthen or soften the tones as required. Each tint is applied using a separate stone bearing the appropriate retouched image. The finished print is produced using at least six, but more commonly from 10 to 15, tint stones.

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End Time: 2025-01-10T06:37:30.000Z

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