About This Image

A very large print in an oval format.The image depicts a celebration in honor of the Emperor Napoleon III. Apparently the Emperor didn't make his own celebration, reportedly because he was spending the time with his mistress, the Comtesse de Castiglione.According to the Metropolitan Museum, "The Imperial Asylum at Vincennes, in a former royal park at the eastern end of Paris, was established by Napoleon III to provide those injured on the construction site or in the factory-"the worker's true field of honor," in the words of the minister of the interior-with care comparable to that given to the nation's military veterans. Nègre was commissioned to photograph the new hospital and to produce copies of a celebratory album in which this photograph appeared as the first plate. Here, the convalescing patients doff their hats to their benefactor, whose sculpted surrogate is the focus of the picture.See: Heilbrun, Charles Negre: Photographe, 1820-1880, no.128. Another copy is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and one other is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.Provenance: the Negre family, Grasse; Galerie Francoise Paviot.

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