La Havre’s Auguste Autin’s photographic series of atmospheric effects may have influence a young man from his same town—Claude Monet—to paint the series of paintings that would found Impressionism. de Font-Réaulx dazzles with a selection of convincing examples illustrating her points without ever losing sight of the bigger picture of the paradigm shift in painting spurred by photography. Likewise, she shows the reciprocal effect on photography, particularly in portraiture, such as in the anonymous portrait of two sisters eerily similar to Théodore Chassériau’s painting (shown above), where photographers borrowed painter’s “tricks” to elude the limitations of the still-young technology.
