Edouard Baldus at the Château de La Faloise

Previously announced Edouard Baldus (18131889) was the most important French architectural photographer of the mid-nineteenth century. This book offers an in-depth exploration of one of his most intriguing projectsa remarkable series of views of the Chateau de La Faloise, in which his subject was not primarily the country house but the owner and his family at leisure on its grounds. James A. Ganz locates the photographs at a key moment in Baldus's career and during one of the most eventful decades in the history of French photography, showing that they stand at a crossroad between the English "conversation piece" and the birth of Impressionist portraiture in the early paintings of Monet and Bazille.

James A. Ganz is curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Clark Art Institute. He is the co-author of Goltzius and the Third Dimension, also available from Yale University Press.