Greene, John B.
American (b. France, 1832-1856)

TITLE ON OBJECT: Bords du Nil à Tèbes [sic]
PUBLISHED TITLE: Village of Gezireh, Egypt
TRANSLATED TITLE: The banks of the Nile at Thebes

1854
salted paper print from a waxed paper negative
23.1 x 27.7 cm.
Museum Purchase: Charina Foundation Purchase Fund
GEH NEG: 48060
92:0384:0001

NON-GEH NUMBER: 37

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES:
Newhall, Beaumont. --John B. Greene, 1834-1856. Discovery and Recognition. Untitled #25.-- Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1981. p. 35.//
Alinder, James G. --Light Years: The Friends of Photography, 1967-1987.-- Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography, 1987. p. 56.//
This image was part of GEH's submission to Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) in 1999.//
Hirsch, Robert. --Seizing the Light: A History of Photography.-- New York: McGraw Hill, 1999. p. 137.//
Mulligan, Therese & Wooters, David. --Photography from 1839 to today: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.-- Cologne: Taschen, 1999. p. 160.//

EXHIBITION HISTORY: "Inside Out: 50 Years of Collecting", US, NY, Rochester April 24, 1999 - March 12, 2000.//

INSCRIPTION: recto-(in image) "P. 37" (signed) "J.B. Greene" (on mount)(in pencil) "37." "Bords du Nil a Tebes."

NOTES: Titled "Luxor, Egypt, c. 1853-1854" in "Light Years" and "Discovery & Recognition". Catalogued 5/92, DZ. Alternate titled from Will Stapp, 4/92. André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, writing in --The Art of French Calotype-- noted: "Greene's work is atypical, however. His monuments and especially landscapes seem distinctly distant, nor do they really seem to be of anything in the normal sense. Greene also had an exceptional attitude toward the representation of landscape space. In the manner of Chinese landscape painters on scrolls, his lens seems to scan a terrain rather than extract it as a fixed whole from a single vantage point. The effect of this is greatly heightened by the emphasis on tonal nuance and an interest in slender sketches of transparent land masses rather than the usual emphasison a solid monument surrounded by a site. ... At age twenty-two, such insights were precocious in the extreme, and his invention regarding expanses of uncharted space takes on greater meaning in the light of the evidence that seems to place him in an American context. It had been rathr difficult to imagine an insular English sensibility capable of conceiving such boundless horizons in photography." [p. 121, n. 186]

SUBJECT: landscape, river / Nile River