Rather infrequently, a photograph just stops my world for a moment, and the image totally absorbs me. This has happened most frequently at exhibitions, but sometimes it just takes a single photograph. Waterloo Place (1899) by Leonard Misonne (1870-1943) is one of those. Definitely a photograph, but almost a painting, it seems to me a practically miraculous work. This article is the result of the impact of that photograph.
Rain, Belgium (1936)
Leonard Misonne was a pictorialist photographer. Pictorialism was a photographic movement from the late 19th to early 20th century that emphasised artistic expression and beauty over factual documentation. The pictorialists were a talented group of people who, in addition to having the skill to take pictures with the cumbersome and slow equipment of the time, realised their vision through a complex end-to-end process that required considerable skill.
They employed extensive darkroom manipulation, sometimes using paintbrushes; they often created their own photographic emulsions and experimented with alternative printing methods. Some even made their own paper. Physics, chemistry and art all played a part in creating a photograph that often looked more like a painting.
Among the pictorialists, Leonard Misonne is remembered for his mastery of light and atmosphere. Amongst the subjects he photographed, he applied these capabilities to the cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the results are captivating.
His urban work, such as Waterloo Place (1899) and Sortie de la garede Namur (1938) showcases his talent to best effect. That’s an opinion, not a fact, but this post reviews his life, work and techniques, with particular emphasis on his urban work.
Waterloo Place (1899)
Early Life and Background
Leonard (Léonard in French) Misonne was born in 1870 in Gilly, near Charleroi, a major coal-mining centre, into a wealthy family whose affluence afforded him the freedom to pursue his interests.
His father, Louis Misonne, was an industrialist and lawyer who made his fortune from coal mining, and Leonard trained as a mining engineer at the University of Leuven. He quickly abandoned the profession, as his inclinations lay elsewhere.
From an early age, his asthmatic condition, though a physical hindrance, instilled in him a fascination with the movement and condition of air and the weather.
He became a keen cyclist, travelling through the countryside and cities of Belgium with a sketchbook or camera to hand. These journeys contributed to his careful observation of light, cloud, and shadow, which would later help to define his photographic work.
Artistic Influences
Although not a painter-turned-photographer like Edward Steichen, Misonne’s photographic vision was influenced by 19th-century painters who emphasized light, atmosphere, and mood.
The most well-known of these today is Gustave Doré, from whose engravings Misonne absorbed chiaroscuro, the dramatic use of light and shadow to create depth and volume, famously exemplified by Caravaggio.
However, The most historically important of his influences was French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. A national treasure in his lifetime, he is known more to curators and art historians than the general public today. At the time, however, parallels with his work earned Misonne the nickname the Corot of photography which was a huge endorsement.
Misonne was also influenced by at least two artistic movements. The Barbizon School was a group of French painters who painted directly from nature, and the later Tonalists were American artists who created paintings awash in mist or atmospheric fog.
Philosophy and Techniques
With these influences, Leonard Misonne rejected the realism of much early photography and sought to elevate the medium to the level of fine art. This was the Pictorialist mission. He subscribed to the Pictorialist belief that photography should evoke rather than record, capturing more than just the facts of a scene.
To this end, he employed a variety of alternative printing processes, often modifying them to suit his needs.
One of Misonne’s preferred techniques was the bromoil process, which allowed him to suppress detail and selectively control tone. The method began with a traditional silver bromide print that he then bleached, hardened, and inked with lithographic brushes. This created the painterly textures needed for his misty streetscapes and glowing landscapes. He learned the process from Émile Constant Puyo, a key figure in French Pictorialism, during a visit to Paris around 1910.
Misonne also experimented with the Fresson process, a secretive carbon print technique developed by the Fresson family, known for its matte finishes and tonal control. Another favoured method was mediobrome, a hybrid of silver gelatin and pigment-based printing which allowed for both photographic realism and artistic manipulation. Misonne’s prints made with mediobrome exhibit a haunting, diffused light, which was a hallmark of his style.
Hybrid Techniques
Sortie de la gare de Namur (1938)
He also developed his own hybrid techniques, most notably photo-dessin and flou-net. Photo-dessin (“photo-drawing”) blended charcoal or pencil sketches with photographic precision, often resulting in images that hovered somewhere between a drawing and a photograph. Flou-net combined softness (flou) with select sharpness (net), creating clarity amidst fog.
All of these methods were in service of what Misonne considered essential: light. His photographs are suffused with mist, low sun, and glowing haze. These were natural elements that were amplified, not fabricated, through his darkroom techniques. Misonne made light itself the subject of his photography. He often placed figures and scenes against the light, backlit by early morning sun or streetlamps in fog, so that their forms became silhouettes or halos within a luminous atmosphere.
One of his most famous quotes is ‘The subject is nothing, light is everything.’
Urban Atmosphere
While his images of the countryside, especially those of the Belgian Ardennes, were widely praised at the time, it is Misonne’s urban works, which captured the industrial beauty of cities like Brussels, Liège, and London, that I find unique and most appealing. Across all of his work, atmosphere was not a secondary consideration to Misonne; it was the subject itself. He was less concerned with what was seen than with what was felt.
A Lynchian Parallel
Despite the cultural and aesthetic contexts being worlds apart, there is something about the dreamlike, foggy ambiguity in industrial settings that reminds me of the work of David Lynch, whom I also greatly admire. Lynch was another great artist who was also less concerned with what was seen than with what was felt. Another parallel between the two artists is decribed in an article in Open Culture. The Art of David Lynch points out that the term ‘Lynchian is necessarily tied to a painterly sensibility’. In Lynch’s case, the painterly influences were René Magritte, Edward Hopper,Arnold Böcklin, and Francis Bacon. Hopper’s Nighthawks and Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, both of which I’ve been lucky enough to see up close, both come to mind here.
The intent behind their work was, of course, very different; Misonne was in pursuit of an idealised vision, even when melancholy. Lynch’s work, with its industrial darkness, dream states, and fog, emphasises decay and is famous for producing substantial quantities of anxiety and existential dread.
Notable Urban Works
Several of Leonard Misonne’s photographs stand out for their urban atmosphere. Many make use of rain and fog as part of the effect. These works seem to me to be some of his most accomplished:
Waterloo Place Perhaps his most celebrated urban image (certainly by me, and shown in this post)
Sortie de la gare de Namur (also an accompanying image) A view of a departing train in dense steam. The tracks recede into haze, and figures blur into shadows
Rain, Belgium, also known as Effet de Pluie (the third image in this post) A rainy street with umbrellas and glowing reflections
La Grand Place de Bruxelles The famous square, seen through a filter of diffused winter light.
Le Voile (The Veil) A foggy street scene where pedestrians seem to vanish into opacity
Rue de Village A quiet city street at dusk, with horse-drawn carriages and gaslight just beginning to show.
Leonard Missone
The Legacy of Leonard Missone
Leonard Misonne died in 1943. He had suffered from severe asthma throughout his life and complications related to this condition led to his death.
His works were celebrated in his own time, but today his reputation today is more specialized, and he is better known in the context of the history of early art photography – a similar fate to his artistic influence, Corot.
Among the Pictorialists, he is usually ranked just below the most internationally recognised figures like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Edward Weston and so falls out of public consciousness.
To my mind, Leonard Misonne is the most accomplished of the Pictorialists in conjuring urban atmosphere, and there is real magic in his work. On this site Leonard Missone joins Brassaï, Fan Ho, Vivian Maier, Cindy Sherman, Saul Leiter and William Klein (so far) – all of whom had the same effect on me – their work moved me, so much so that I felt compelled to learn and write about their work.
There is something magical to me about pictorialist photography, particularly urban pictorialism, as shown here in Leonard Misonne’s accomplished example from 1899. Here, Horse-drawn carriages seem to dissolve into the luminous haze, while lamplight glows softly through the mist, diffusing across a street slick with rain. The placement of the two men on the left, even the angle of the umbrella, seem to me to be just perfect.
There is much to admire in photographs like this, as well as in the photographers themselves. In addition to having the skill to take pictures with the cumbersome and slow equipment of the time, the pictorialist’s vision was realised through a complex end-to-end process that required yet more skill and talent. They had to be skilled in darkroom manipulation, often making their emulsions and embracing alternative printing methods. Some even made their own paper. So, there is much to appreciate about these photographers and their work, but what exactly is pictorialism?
Summary – Pictorialism in 100 words
Pictorialism emerged in the late 19th century, driven by photographers’ desire to reinvent the medium of photography as an art form, emphasising beauty, tonality, and composition to elevate photography to the same level as painting. The Pictorialists used soft-focus, experimental techniques and processes, artisan chemicals and special papers to create their atmospheric images and increase their artistic impact. The movement was most active between 1885 and 1915. It waned with the rise of straight photography, which valued sharpness and documentary precision, but set the stage for future artistic photography and innovation in the field of photography.
But is it Art?
To explore the much asked question ‘what is pictorialism?’ we need to ask a more fundamental question that is central to the movement and its development. That is, ‘is photography art’?
From its inception, when it took a mastery of optics, chemistry, and an arcane workflow to take and process a photograph there had been a debate about the nature of photography. Was this new invention only capable of reproduction or could it transcend its machine origins and produce art?
In the early years of its development, photography was sometimes looked down upon as purely mechanical, but as early as 1853 the English miniaturist Sir William John Newton was championing the cause of photography as art. Newton also suggested that photographers could make their pictures more like works of art by throwing the subject slightly out of focus and using retouching techniques.
Pictorialist Influences
Hill and Adamson
Photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson had a strong influence on the development of Pictorialism. The partnership was formed in Edinburgh in July 1843, just four years after the invention of photography was announced. In the four years that followed they produced an extraordinary body of work that included portraits, landscapes and social documentary using the Calotype process.
The strong sunlight needed to produce a successful calotype meant that Hill & Adamson were required to work outdoors and one of their most important achievements was the portrayal of The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth, shot at Newhaven, a small fishing village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. The portraits are considered to be the first social documentary photographs and were compared by some critics of the time to those of Rembrandt. Alfred Stieglitz would later describe Hill as “the father of pictorial photography” and would featured the duo’s photographs in his publications and the galleries of the Photo-Secession.
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was also an important pictorialist influence whose pictures would be championed by Stieglitz in CameraWork (volume 41, 1913). Cameron’s photographs had a romantic and expressionist style and often used slightly blurred focus. She considered her pictures art well before the pictorialist movement got underway and took inspiration from artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo.
When Cameron received the gift of a camera in December 1863 her husband was in Ceylon attending to the family’s coffee plantations, and her children were no longer at home. Photography became her focus and a link to the writers, artists, and scientists of her well-connected circle. Although she took up photography as an amateur with no knowledge and she worked at it with great energy and once she had developed her technique started to vigorously copyright, exhibit, publish, and market her work. She developed close links to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). IT was home to her first exhibition in 1865 and home to her portrait studio in 1868.
Cameron was an outstanding portraitist, producing brooding head and shoulders shots of the famous men of her acquaintance including English poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson and mathematician, scientist and photography pioneer Sir John Herschel. Her work also consisted of theatrical tableaux from myth, the Bible, Shakespeare, and the works of Coleridge and Tennyson. Today, she is considered one of the most important and innovative photographers of the 19th century.
Oscar Gustav Rejlander
Oscar Gustav Rejlander was one of the fathers of art photography, and a pioneer of photomontage. Originally a painter, he rejected the contemporary view of photography as a scientific or technical medium and made photographs that imitated painting, inspired by the Old Masters.
It was a visit to Rome in 1852 that was the catalyst for his interest in photography. Shortly after his return, Rejlander took photography lessons with Nicolaas Henneman, previously an assistant of William Henry Fox Talbot, after which he adapted his artist’s studio in Wolverhampton for photography. In 1857 Rejlander produced his masterpiece, a 31-by-16-inch image, by joining 30 negatives together. The Two Ways of Life was both technically ambitious and controversial, depicting an elaborate and moralising allegory of the choice between vice and virtue. Rejlander photographed each model and background section separately, using more than thirty negatives. These were then combined into a single large print which demonstrated the aesthetic possibilities of photography.
The picture caused a sensation initially but became the lead example in a polarised public debate on art, photography and whether combining images was acceptable.
Lady Clementia Hawarden
Rejlander admired the work of another photographic pioneer, Lady Clementina Hawarden, whose work is sometimes compared to Julia Margaret Cameron’s, though to my mind it is very different. Rejlander observed that ‘she aimed at elegant and if possible, idealised truth’.
As a Victorian woman, coming to photography in the late 1850s, Hawarden’s work was confined to her first-floor studio in her elegant Kensington home. Her images pushed the boundaries of art and photography using a careful selection of props, clothing, and model poses using her daughters as her subjects were her daughters. Their likenesses in her work were often reminiscent of the pre-Raphaelite artists.
Hawarden’s photographs demonstrated technical excellence as well as innovation and she became an expert in indoor photography. This expertise was recognised by two silver medals the Photographic Society of London.
Peach Robertson’s Pictorial Effect
Rejlander’s work also inspired Henry Peach Robinson, a British photographer who, like Rejlander, had previously trained as an artist. He achieved fame with his five-negative print of 1859, Fading Away, depicting a young consumptive dying in her bed surrounded by her family. Like Rejlander’s work, the tableau caused controversy due to the photograph’s artificial technique and morbid subject matter, with critics questioning whether a single picture from multiple negatives made photography untruthful.
Robinson, a member of the Photographic Society, published his manifesto Pictorial Effect in Photography in 1869. The work, which gave the movement its name, included compositional formulas taken from a handbook on painting and made the case that rules created for one art form could apply to another.
Emerson and Naturalistic Photography
In the 1880s the British photographer Peter Henry Emerson proposed an alternative artistic vision for photography. He was a dedicated student of the arts, influenced and inspired by the naturalist school of painters, which included Jean-François Millet. Millet’s rendered his landscapes and peasant scenes in low tones and with a softened atmosphere, but they were realistic enough for him to periodically face the charge of being a socialist.
Emerson’s vision was that photographs should reflect nature and be produced without artificial means. He believed that the tone, texture, and light of the scene were enough to make photography an art form. This point of view became known as naturalistic photography after the publication of his treatise Naturalistic Photography in 1889, in which he outlined a system of aesthetics. This treatise insisted that photography should show real people in their own environment, and avoid costumes, posed models or backdrops.
Improvements in Technology
Emerson embraced the photogravure process which was refined by Karl Klíc, a painter living in Vienna, who patented an improvement on William Henry Fox Talbot’s earlier process. The Talbot-Klíc process allowed for deeper etched shadows and the transfer of the negative image to a copper plate using gelatin-coated carbon paper. It was published in 1886.
Wind, Fire, Therese Duncan on the Acropolis, Athens by Edward Steichen (1921)
In 1888, the introduction of the point-and-shoot Kodak camera, together with printing as a service, greatly accelerated the popularisation of photography. This only intensified the public debate about the role of the medium, which reached its peak by the end of the century.
As photography became popular serious amateurs, many inspired by Emerson’s ideas and images, began to explore the medium’s expressive potential. This resulted in the first truly international photographic movement – The Pictorialism Movement. The movement represented a shift of focus from Emerson’s Naturalism to the broader expression of photographers as artists.
What is Pictorialism?
The pictorialist photographers produced pictures that were the polar opposite of the output of point-and shoot. They used soft focus techniques, a range of darkroom techniques and alternative printing processes to produce beautifully rendered, skilfully composed, highly picturesque, atmospheric and often otherworldly images. These were hand printed (usually on hand-coated artist papers) using artisan emulsions and pigments, making the production of an image much closer to the creation of a painting.
The movement sometimes goes under other names including “art photography”, “Impressionist photography”, “new vision, and “subjective photography.
Pictorialism was closely linked to influential artistic movements such as Tonalism and Impressionism, and the Pictorialists took inspiration from popular art, adopting its styles and ideas to demonstrate that photography was an artistic process.
The emergence of Pictorialism was also the product of the meeting of photography and art in practical terms. Artists started to use photographs to capture images that would be rendered as paintings later, whilst some Pictorialists had been trained as painters.
No Accepted Definition
There is no accepted definition of Pictorialism. The Britannica definition is “an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.” This is helpful, though in addition to an approach it is also variously defined as a style, particularly of fine art photography, and as an aesthetic or international movement, including an art movement. The Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago captures much of this in this description:
“The international movement known as Pictorialism represented both a photographic aesthetic and a set of principles about photography’s role as art. Pictorialists believed that photography should be understood as a vehicle for personal expression on par with the other fine arts. Responding to both the new Kodak camera “snapshooters” and formulaic commercial photographers, the Pictorialists proudly defined themselves as true amateurs—those who pursued photography out of a love for the art.”
Understanding Pictorialism
To understand Pictorialism it’s worth reviewing what Pictorialist pictures have in common. Landscape photographer Sandy King (who still works with 19th century hand made photographic processes) offers an excellent description of its characteristics:
Only images which show the personality of the maker, generally through hand manipulation, can be considered works of art
An interest in the effect and patterns of natural lighting in the outdoor landscape
An impressionistic rendering of the scene, in which overall effect is more important than detail
The use of symbolism or allegory to reveal a message
The use of alternative printing processes: carbon and carbro, gum bichromate, oil and bromoil, direct carbon, and platinum.
A review of the techniques Pictorialists used to convert the camera into something closer to a paintbrush is also enlightening. These included darkroom manipulation, the combining of multiple negatives, the use of artisan emulsions, printing using photogauvre, gum bichromate, or bromoil, or with precious metals like platinum, and the use of paintbrushes and handmade paper.
Like a painter, these photographers could build up the surfaces or reduce them to a wash, applied with a paintbrush. The effects could be enhanced by increasing or flattening contrast in the darkroom.
In addition to giving the pictures their unique look, these techniques also ensured that no two prints looked identical, even if they came from the same negative.
As the A-Z list shows, many prominent Pictorialist photographers were women at a time when photography was largely male dominated. Female practitioners included Anne Brigman; Alice Boughton ; Julia Margaret Cameron; Imogen Cunningham; Mary Devens; Gertrude Käsebier; Adelaide Marquand Hanscom Leeson; Emily H. Pitchford; Sarah Choate Sears; Eva Watson-Schütze.
Léonard Misonne
As Waterloo Place is the pictorialist photograph I admire the most, it would be remiss of me not to mention the photographer behind the shot. Léonard Misonne (1870-1943, Belgian) was not only a master of mood but also of meticulous photographic craft, using and adapting alternative processes to infuse his images with atmosphere.
One of Misonne’s preferred techniques was the bromoil process, which allowed him to suppress detail and selectively control tone. The method began with a traditional silver bromide print that was then bleached, hardened, and inked with lithographic brushes. This created soft transitions and painterly textures, ideal for his misty streetscapes and glowing landscapes. He learned the process from Émile Constant Puyo, a key figure in French Pictorialism, during a visit to Paris around 1910.
Misonne also experimented with the Fresson process, a secretive carbon print technique developed by the Fresson family, known for its matte finishes and tonal control. Another favoured method was mediobrome, a hybrid of silver gelatin and pigment-based printing which allowed for both photographic realism and artistic manipulation. Misonne’s prints made with mediobrome exhibit a haunting, diffused light, which was a hallmark of his style.
Misonne alos developed his own hybrid techniques, most notably photo-dessin and flou-net. Photo-dessin (literally “photo-drawing”) blended charcoal or pencil sketches with photographic precision, often resulting in images that hovered somewhere between a drawing and a photograph. Flou-net combined softness (flou) with select sharpness (net), creating a dreamlike clarity amidst visual fog.
All of these methods were in service of what Misonne considered essential: light. His photographs are suffused with mist, low sun, and glowing haze. These were natural elements that were amplified, not fabricated, through his darkroom techniques. Misonne made light itself the subject of his photography. One of his most famous quotes is ‘The subject is nothing, light is everything.’
Pictorialist Clubs and Organisations
These photographers, who considered themselves artists, formed clubs and salons such as The Linked Ring, The Royal Photographic Society, The Photo-Club of Paris and The Trifolium of Austria all of which promoted photography as fine art. As part of the advocacy for the expressive power of the photograph these clubs and organisations produced lavish journals and exhibition catalogues featuring beautiful hand-made photogravures.
The Photo Secession
In 1902 Alfred Stieglitz formed the Photo-Secession, a society with the stated aim of seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph. It was inspired by art movements in Europe, such as the Linked Ring. Stieglitz described the aim of Photo-Secession as “to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography in their endeavour to compel its recognition, not as the handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.” He described its attitude as “one of rebellion against the insincere attitude of the unbeliever, of the Philistine, and largely of exhibition authorities”. The “membership” of the Photo-Secession was largely set by Stieglitz’s predilections. The core members were Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White, Gertrude Käsebier, Frank Eugene, F. Holland Day, and later Alvin Langdon Coburn.
The Photo-Secession actively promoted its pictorialist ideas through the influential quarterly Camera Work and the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (also known as the 291) which provided a place for the members to exhibit their work. Painter and photographer Edward Steichen and other notable artists were instrumental in developing the program of exhibitions at the gallery, which featured exhibitions by important European artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso that would influence artists across media around the world.
By 1910 Photo-Secession had become divided over the degree of manipulation of negatives and prints that was appropriate and divided. In 1916 Käsebier, White, Coburn and others formed the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA) to continue promotion of the pictorialism. A year later Stieglitz formally dissolved the Photo-Secession, although it had not been active for some time.
The Decline of Pictorialism
The heyday of Pictorialism was from the 1880s to 1915. Unsurprisingly for such a romantic movement it lost momentum after the World War I and was a spent force by the end of World War II. It was superseded by the sharp focus of Modernism in Europe and the West Coast or Straight photography movement in the USA, the greatest exponents of which were Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.
Later Pictorialists and Neo Pictorialism
Pictorialism had all but disappeared by the 1920s, but some photographers persisted with it. Adolf Fassbender, for example, kept making pictorial photographs into the late 1960s. In the 1990s the label neo-pictorialist was applied to some photographers influenced by the original movement. An article in Vice describes the emergence of neo-pictorialism well:
“A century after the fight for legitimacy, photography is now cycling back to its beginnings with a rise in traditional and alternative processes through companies such as the Impossible Project and Lomography seeking to reclaim analogue photography and leave behind the freneticism and immediate gratification of a digital photograph—much in the same way that Pictorialists sought to slow down the photography of their time with an eye to the myriad possibilities of the medium.”
Photography as Art
The ideas of Newton, Rejlander, Robinson, and Emerson’s were not the same, but they were all pioneers for photography to be considered a legitimate art form. This is a question that rarely crops up today, but for those who wish to ponder it I’ll take a proof point from many possible options. In 2011 a grey image of the Rhine by German artist Andreas Gursky sold for $4.3m (£2.7m) at auction, setting a new record at the time. The grey and featureless landscape was described by the artist as an allegorical picture about the meaning of life. That sounds like art to me.
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