Baron Adolf de Meyer: Maria, A Study

Published by the Two Red Roses Foundation, February 1, 2015

The Two Red Roses Foundation is very pleased to have added to its photography collection the very rare and only extant platinum print Maria, A Study (shown right) by Baron Adolf de Meyer. The ca. 1910 print is 14 ¼ x 11 in., signed and marked "No. 7/201", and came in its original exhibition frame with "Chapman Bros. Picture Frame Makers, London" labeled on the reverse.

Baron Adolf de Meyer (1868-1946) spent his childhood in Paris and Germany and began to exhibit his photography when he was around twenty-six years old. In 1895 he relocated from Dresden to London, where he was admitted to the Royal Photographic Society and the Linked Ring. De Meyer became friends with Alfred Stieglitz, who published de Meyer's photographs in several issues of his publication Camera Work; eventually de Meyer joined Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Movement. In 1914, publisher Condé Nast hired de Meyer as the first full-time photographer at Vogue magazine and contracted him to work for Vanity Fair. In 1921, he left Nast to work for the William Randolph Hearst publication Harper's Bazaar in Paris, where he became the preeminent fashion photographer of the day. Here is a link to one of the best and most comprehensive articles on Baron de Meyer by E. Brown.

Maria, A Study, (pictured above right) was one of 25 photographs by de Meyer included in the landmark International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography held at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1910. The print is housed in its original frame from that exhibition, with the original exhibition number affixed to its glass. Aside from twelve of de Meyer's photographs that were purchased after the exhibition by the Albright Art Gallery, very few of the show's prints, in their original frames, have been located.

The 1910 Buffalo exhibition was, as critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote, "the most complete and comprehensive survey of pictorialism ever arranged in this country." Organized by Stieglitz, the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography featured nearly 600 photographs. During its 29-day run, it drew over 15,000 visitors, breaking all of the Gallery's previous attendance records. By the end of the exhibition, no fewer than 53 prints had been sold to the public, including this print.

With 25 entries, de Meyer was one of the most represented photographers in the exhibition. Writing in American Photography, F. Austin Lidbury hailed de Meyer's "wonderful assortment of portraits and character studies… each carried out with an extraordinary mastery of tone, light, and texture… 'Maria, A Study' is invested with dramatic elegance, the intensity of the mode's gaze heightened by the bravura quality of the print. In its conception and execution, the photograph is quintessential Baron de Meyer."

Because de Meyer destroyed many of his prints and negatives, early examples of his work are very scarce. In a 1940 letter to Stieglitz, de Meyer despaired, "I have in 1935 destroyed all that was superfluous-it seemed to me a burden-all my photographic work especially". Maria, A Study was saved from this fate by Mrs. Samuel Strong Spaulding of Buffalo, who purchased it directly from the 1910 Albright Art Gallery exhibition.

The Two Red Roses Foundation owns fifteen of de Meyer's photogravures tipped-in in Stieglitz's Camera Work No. 40, three of which are shown below.