The auction house Millon disperses, Thursday, November 10 in Paris, the collection of this collector and gallery owner who helped write the history of photography.
by Claire Guillot
Thursday, November 10, the Millon auction house must disperse a rare fund of old photos in Paris: the collection gathered by François Lepage, a merchant who helped write the history of photography. Are offered prints signed by the “primitives” of photography (before 1860) and many rarities never crossed: “Apart from two photos that François Lepage had loaned for exhibitions and books, most of the photographs have never been shown , and all the big collectors came to see the pieces, says the expert Christophe Gutey. François Lepage gathered only extremely beautiful prints, of museum quality. “
Among the remarkable images of the sale, one is famous: a draw by Félix Nadar (1820-1910) and his brother Adrien Tournachon (1825-1903), Pierrot with the fruit basket (1854-1855), From the series produced with the Mime Deburau (1796-1846) and which had caused a sensation at the time – it was exhibited in a significant exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, in 1994, and was estimated between 120,000 and 150,000 euros. We also find, at high prices, several of the great historical authors of photography: a landscape of Edouard Baldus (1813-1889), between 25,000 and 30,000 euros, a melancholic navy of Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) , Sun effect in the cloud clouds (1856), estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 euros.
But the sale also highlights the less known passions of a secret merchant, who with his colleagues, in the 1970s and 1980s, retraced the first steps of the pioneers of photography and identified the important images. “It is someone who built his collection at the same time that he helped write a facet of the history of photography”, summarizes Sylvie Aubenas, director of the Department of Prints and Photography at the National Library of France , one of the few to have known it closely.
From his boutique des Puces de Saint-Ouen, François Lepage worked, from the 1960s, to find, buy, identify authors and their forgotten prints, often stored in the granaries and threatened to finish in the trash. Following André Jammes, a famous merchant of old photos whose legendary collection reached stratospheric prices during a sale in 1999, François Lepage was a part in the 1970s of the “French amateurs” clique, according to the Words of the historian Eugenia Parry: a group of passionate merchants who included Gérard Lévy, who was a time the partner of François Lepage, and the “Texbraun”, duo composed by François Braunschweig and Hugues Autexier, whose shop was neighboring that of François Lepage aux Puces de Saint-Ouen.
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