The Museum of Fine Arts of Seville exposes the first photograph that took Montpensier in 1859.
In a statement, the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Junta de Andalucía has reported that the image is part of a sample that brings together the funds from the collection Fernández Rivero and shows a set of three stores mounted on a platform in the Prado de San Sebastián, where the Sevillian fair was held until the early 1970s, according to reports EFE.
Dated in 1859, it was taken by the Sevillian photographer Francisco Leygonierand it is seen in this monographic exhibition that the Pinacoteca dedicates to this pioneer of photographic art.
The museum’s sample brings together, until June 8, more than 80 originals, the vast majority from the Fernández Rivero collection and among them, there are also views of monuments of Seville, Granada and Córdoba, portraits, reproductions of paintings and some prints of Andalusian party, such as Holy Week.
It is an image of which there are no more specimens, or copies, consisting of a calotipo positivated on a salt paper, 132 x 230 millimeters.
It was acquired by Juan Antonio Fernández Riverocommissioner of this exhibition next to María Teresa García Ballesterosat an auction held in Paris, and until now it had not been exposed.
“Without any kind of doubt, it is the first documented image of the April Fair of Seville,” he said Fernández Riverowhich has pointed out that we have to wait more than two decades, in the 1980s of the nineteenth century, to document other snapshots of the Sevillian fairgrounds, “those of the Sevillians Ramón Almela and Emilio Beauchy, as well as those of the Parisian house Léon et Levy, and even, to a lesser extent, those of the Granadino Rafael Garzón and the Cordoba Tomás Molina”.
“The photograph of the Feria booth of the Dukes of Montpensier is one of the most outstanding works of this exhibition,” according to the Minister of Culture and Sports, Patricia del Pozo, for whom he shows it, “a fair tribute to its author”, Francisco, Francisco Leygonier.
On the date on which this image was taken, 1859, Leygonier was an official photographer of the Montpensier house, a position that had been granted four years before.
By then, he had already carried out several photographic projects for the Duke, such as the Tomas of his Sevillian residence -the Palace of San Telmo -, family portraits, different views of Seville, as well as reproductions of the paintings that were part of the particular collection of the marriage formed by the Dukes of Montpensier: Antonio María de Orleans and María Luisa Fernanda.
This appointment, as well as the front sweeping that presents the lower part of this snapshot, something very characteristic of this photographer, allows the attribution of the authorship of this first image of the Sevillian fair to Leygonier.
This photographer, according to Fernández Rivero, “used to make a cover or reserve in the negative of the calotypes to disappear the floor of a shot when he did not like the result”, a custom that can be seen in several of the images of the exhibition, as well as in his catalog.
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