Léonard MISONNE (1870-1943): 2 photographs 1 signed and dated 1937

Léonard Misonne is the seventh son of Louis Misonne, a lawyer and industrialist, and Adèle Pirmez. He studied mining engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven, but has never practised as an engineer. Still a student, he was interested in music, painting and, from 1891, photography on which he focussed exclusively from 1896. Misonne makes several trips to Switzerland, Germany and France. He makes himself known with his reworked light effects. The subject is nothing, the light is everything, he says. Misonne is known for its sense of atmosphere, but its approach is labelled from an artistic point of view as conservative and sentimental [ref. necessary]. His blurred effects, with the Impressionist approach, earned him the nickname Corot of Photography. Misonne first worked with the photography process obtained from a suspension of silver bromide in gelatin that he learned in 1910 in Paris from Constant Puyo, then he used the direct coal print developed by Théodore-Henri Fresson. This technique allows him to take his photographs directly without having to transfer glass to paper. He became an internationally renowned leader of pictorialism and a well-known figure in avant-garde circles. Most of his pictures were taken in Belgium and the Netherlands; they are mainly landscapes, sometimes beach scenes and views of Ghent and Antwerp. He developed the mediobromine, a variant of bromoil, which he practised from 1935 to 1943.