Biography (Courtesy of Christian Peterson)
 
Demachy was the most well-known French pictorialist around the turn of the twentieth century. He was born Léon Robert Demachy in Saint Germain-en-Laye (near Paris), on July 7, 1859, into a wealthy banking family. He spent his formative years cultivating himself in music, painting, and literature, and volunteered for a year in the French army.
 
In 1882, he joined the Société Française de Photographie, and shortly thereafter was a cofounder of the Photo-Club de Paris, a group devoted exclusively to artistic photography. He served on the editorial committee of the club's monthly publication and helped organize it first salon of photographic art, in 1894.
 
The same year, Demachy began using the recently revived gum-bichromate process, a printing method that allowed extensive hand manipulation of the image. Later, he also made Rawlins oil and oil transfer prints. His photographs often pictured nude female subjects handled in a very painterly manner. He wrote extensively on photographic technique and aesthetics, including six books, the first of which, with Alfred Maskell, appeared in 1897 and addressed gum printing. Hundreds of articles by him were published in magazines in France, England, and the United States.
 
Fluent in English, Demachy maintained correspondence for over ten years with Alfred Stieglitz, who included both articles and images by him in Camera Notes and Camera Work. Stieglitz trusted Demachy's eye to the extent that he had him select the work for a group exhibition of French photographs that was seen at New York's Photo-Secession Galleries in 1906. Demachy enjoyed long lasting visibility in England's Photograms of the Year. Reproductions of his work appeared every year but once between 1896 and 1916, and during much of this time he also wrote an annual review of pictorial photography in France. English organizations that welcomed him included the Linked Ring Brotherhood, which elected him to membership in 1895, and the Royal Photographic Society, which declared him an honorary fellow (Hon. FRPS) ten years later.
 
Demachy exhibited extensively, beginning by 1892, when some of his photographs were seen at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Paris. Over the next twenty years, his work was included in exhibitions in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Florence, Hamburg, Leeds, New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, St. Louis, and Vienna. In 1904, he had a solo show at the Royal Photographic Society, in London.
 
In 1910, Demachy's images were used to illustrate two fictional travel books by Anna Bowman Dodd. Titled In and Out of Three Normandy Inns and In and Out of a French Country House, they featured his accomplished soft-focus renderings of quant French scenery and people. Shortly thereafter, at the outbreak of World War I, Demachy inexplicably gave up photography for drawing. So in 1929, when Three Normandy Inns was republished (in a slightly larger format), it included reproductions of Demachy's drawings rather than his photographs.
 
Even after he stopped photographing, Demachy continued to send his work to photographic salons, nearly until his death. Among them were those in New York in 1923 (sponsored by the Pictorial Photographers of America), Paris and London in 1927, and Chicago in 1933 (as part of the Century of Progress Exposition). Robert Demachy died on December 29, 1936, at Hennequeville, and was buried in the family tomb at Père Lachaise, in Paris.
 
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
 
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
 
Biography provided by Focal press
 
The leading French pictorialist, member of the Linked Ring, exhibitor at Stieglitz' 291 gallery who championed the manipulated image with an outpouring of prints, lectures, and articles. Demachy's diverse subject matter often reverberated with the impressionistic style and always revealed the hand of their maker. Technically brilliant, especially in gum bichromate printing, Demachy was disdainful of the clarity of detail and the automatic trace of reality of the "straight," unmanipulated print and defended the painterly image arguing:
 
"A work of art must be a transcription, not a copy of nature … there is not a particle of art in the most beautiful scene of nature. The art is man's alone, it is subjective not objective."
 
(Author: RH)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)