Dürer reproduced by Baldus, original plate
suspicion of counterfeiting: the baldus case
contents: Weekly Cartoon by Théophile: Wanted Baldus Baldus’ Warrant of Apprehension (German and English translation). Money Art and Suspicion of Counterfeiting The Secret of Baldus Baldus’ improvements in photographic reproduction A choice of Baldus’ original heliogravure copper plates at auction A choice of Baldus’ salt paper and albumen prints at auction Bibliographical elements on Baldus’ Heliogravures
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Pater Lindlein. Das Geheimnis des Ed(o)uard Baldus
Counterfeit money is imitation currency produced without the legal sanction of the state. Producing or using counterfeit money is a form of fraud or forgery. Counterfeiting is almost as old as money itself...
baldus’s Warrant of apprehension. (transliteration) “steckbrief. der vormalige bombardier eduard baldus, zu grünebach, im Kreise altenkirchen, regierungsbezirk Koblenz, gebürtig, und zuletzt in Köln wohnhaft, welcher der anfertigung und respec-tiven verbreitung falscher Kassen-anweisungen beschuldigt ist, hat sich der dieserhalb gegen ihn eingelei-teten untersuchung durch die flucht entzogen. indem ich dessen signalement hier unten beifüge, ersuche ich sämmtliche polizeibehörden auf densel-ben zu wachen, ihn im betretungsfalle zu arretiren, und mir vorführen zu lassen. Köln, den 16. februar 1835.
der Königl. instruktionsrichter, ludowigs.”
The e-bulletin presents articles as well as selections of books, albums, photographs and documents as they have been handed down to the actual owners by their creators and by amateurs from past generations.
n°18-2017: baldus Previous transmissions can be found at www.plantureux.fr
Weekly Cartoon by ThĂŠophile Bouchet: Wanted Baldus
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Steckbrief.
Der vormalige Bombardier Eduard Baldus, zu Gru ̈nebach, im Kreise
Altenkirchen, Regierungsbezirk Koblenz, gebu ̈rtig, und zuletzt in Ko ̈ ln
wohnhaft, welcher der Anfertigung und respectiven Verbreitung falscher Kassen-Anweisungen beschuldigt ist, hat sich der dieserhalb gegen ihn eingeleiteten Untersuchung durch die Flucht entzogen.
Indem ich dessen Signalement hier unten beifu ̈ ge, ersuche ich sa ̈ mmtliche Polizeibeho ̈ rden auf denselben zu wachen, ihn im Betretungsfalle zu arretiren, und mir vorfu ̈ hren zu lassen.
Ko ̈ ln, den 16. Februar 1835. Der Ko ̈ nigl. Instruktionsrichter: Ludowigs.
Signalement.
Namen, Eduard Baldus; Alter 21 Jahre; Gro ̈ ße 5 Fuß 4 Zoll; Religion
katholisch; Haare dunkelblond; Stirn hoch; Augenbrauen braun; Augen blau und groß; Nase gewo ̈ hnlich; Mund gewo ̈ hnlich, jedoch mit etwas aufgeworfenen Lippen; Bart braun, (trug ein kleines Ba ̈ rtchen); Kinn
gewo ̈ hnlich; Gesichtsfarbe gesund; Gesicht rund und oval, und Statur klein aber robust.
Warrant of Apprehension. Former Bombardier Eduard Baldus, native of Grünebach, in the district of Altenkirchen, Regierungsbezirk Koblenz, and lastly resident in Cologne, accused of the preparation and the relative dissemination of false cash instructions, has withdrawn himself from this investigation initiated against him by the flight. By adding the signaling below, I ask all police officers to look after them, to arrest him, lock him in the trap, and to advise me. Cologne, February 16, 1835. The King, Instructional Judge: Ludowigs. Signalement. Names, Eduard Baldus; Age 21 years; Size 5 feet 4 inches; Religion Catholic; Hair darkblond; Brow high; Eyebrow brown; Eyes blue and large; Nose ordinary; Mouth common, but with lips slightly raised; Beard brown, (carrying a little beard); Chin ordinary; Healthy face; Face round and oval, and stature small but sturdy.
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MĂźnzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen Berlin
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tresor schein von fĂźnf thaler in courant, prussian bill, 5 thaler, 1806 The thaler was a silver coin used throughout Europe for almost four hundred years. Its name lives on in the many currencies called dollar, a famous one is the US dollar. This Prussian bannote reproduces on paper the shape of the 5 thaler silver coin.
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MĂźnzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen Berlin
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prussian treasury bill 1 thaler, 1834
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Money art Money art incorporates currency designs or themes. Some of these works of art are similar enough to actual bills that their legality is in question. While a counterfeit is made with deceptive intent, money art is not; however, the law may not differentiate between the two. James Stephen George Boggs is best known for his hand-drawn, one-sided depictions of US banknotes... which he sold for the face value of the note. Boggs viewed his "transactions" as a type of performance art, but the US authorities often viewed them with suspicion. The street artist Banksy is known for making 10 pound notes that feature Princess Diana's portrait in place of the Queen, while "Bank of England" is replaced by "Banksy of England". The artist's original intent was to throw them off a building, but after some of the notes were dropped at a festival he discovered that they could pass for legal tender and changed his mind. Banksy is still in possession of all one hundred million pounds' worth of the currency. In 2006, American artist Jack Daws hired metalsmiths to make a mold of a 1970 U.S. penny and cast it in 18-karat gold before to copper-plate it, after which it looked like an ordinary penny. On March 28, 2007, the "penny" was put in circulation at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Discovered in Brooklyn two-and-a-half years later by a coin collector, who noticed it while paying for groceries at a local store... (Counterfeit money, Wikipedia)
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the secret of baldus Edouard Baldus is known as a major photographer of the 19th century, one of the Famous Five who participated in the 1851 Mission héliographique in France. In 1994, Malcolm Daniel edited an impressive Baldus catalogue and biography, and Edouard became one of the very first photographers to have a scientific monography dedicated to his complete works. Malcolm Daniel received a very curious message ten years later as he told in an article published in the blog of the Metropolitan Museum, New York : “.... you might imagine my wariness when I first saw the email about the "secret" of Baldus, sent by Dr. Peter Lindlein. "I make my living as an international consultant," it began, "and spend some of my time making photographs and some of my money collecting photo books— and I am living near Grünebach." Grünebach! Well, that got my attention. "Thus it may have been only a matter of time before I discovered the work of Édouard Baldus and your fascinating studies," he continued. "But it was by chance that I discovered something more: the secret of Éd(o)uard Baldus's past—or at least a very important and amazingly interesting part of it." Dr. Lindlein continued: "After his time as a soldier Eduard Baldus lives in Cologne. The life of a soldier is too modest, the pay too meager, and Cologne, a city with seventy thousand inhabitants, offers too many temptations for a country boy standing at the edge of adult life." Now I was hooked. How did Peter Lindlein know that Baldus was in the Army and that he lived in Cologne, and what sort of temptations did he mean? I kept reading: "Eduard Baldus is 21 years, measures 5 foot 4 inch, is small but robust, Catholic, has dark blond hair, a receding hairline, and a small moustache, big blue eyes and a healthy complexion." Really? I had seen only two photographic portraits of Baldus, both from the mid-1850s, which showed a bearded, dark-haired man… and I couldn't possibly tell what color his eyes were. Peter Lindlein can tell the rest of the story: "If this sounds like a police bulletin, it is. Eduard Baldus is wanted throughout the Rhine Province. All of the official gazettes of the Government, in Cologne and Düsseldorf, Aachen and Koblenz, carry the following arrest warrant, dated February 16, 1835: Warrant of Apprehension. The former bombardier Eduard Baldus, born in Grünebach, in the county Altenkirchen, governorate Koblenz, and most recently residing in Cologne, who is accused of making and distributing forged Cash Notes, evaded the corresponding investigation by escape.
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But we know the young Baldus made his way. The maximum imprisonment of the Prussian Land Law for the counterfeiting and spreading of counterfeit money, namely lifelong fortification work, which had been printed on the cash registers he had produced, did not seem to have deterred him. But the Prussian Provinces of the Rhine (Coblence) are still governed by other laws, that is, the death penalty. Eduard Baldus manage to cross the Rhine and escape to France. He need to invent a past, this main explain the confusing information about his origin that Malcolm Daniel found when he prepared his classical book on Baldus photographer. Peter Lindlein who found this interesting document investigated the criminal archive: In the Rhine province, another counterfeiter named Johann Peter Kuhn was still sentenced to death in Dusseldorf, his revision due to changed law being rejected. (See Archive for Civil and Criminal Law of the King. Preuss. Rhine provinces. 1834, NF 14.P P.27). For even in 1842, Theodor Herweg, who had been arrested in Cologne in 1834, was still seeking refuge in the Rhineland, and in the beginning of the 1840s he could present himself as Theodor Romanzow in Paris, and got a passport from the Prefect of the Police under the name Danello de Winiarski.
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"In Paris, did Baldus ever resort to his old art to improve the modest income of his family? Did he come under pressure when former accomplices came to Paris in the early 1840s? We'll likely never know, but in any case, he never betrayed his secret. He was probably reformed forever by his dramatic escape from the scaffold, as he did not make use of his printing techniques to avoid bankruptcy. However, would there have been the photographer Édouard Baldus without the counterfeiter Eduard Baldus? Although the winding road from Grünebach to Paris ended in poverty—what a life! More exactly: How many lives! Soldier, counterfeiter, emigrant, painter, husband and father, photographer, printer, publisher—and, again and again, inventor, especially of himself." There is another secret about Baldus that scholars are investigating for a few years (Cf. Jennifer I. Yeates, Héliogravures : the unpublished photogravure process of Édouard Baldus, Ryerson University: Toronto, 2010 ; Katie Addleman-Frankel, After photography? The Photogravure Publications of Édouard Baldus Reconsidered. Rijksmuseum: Amsterdam, 2017), the secret of his photogravures, the most accomplished and beautiful of 19th century.
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“Baldus gravure process (or “héliogravure,” as he called it) triumphed equally as a photographic method of producing facsimile gravures and as a gravure method of printing photographic images. His first major publications in gravure form, issued from 1866 to 1869, all reproduced ornamental engravings by past masters—Heinrich Aldegrever, Hans Sebald Beham, Jacques Androuet Ducerceau, Albrecht Dürer. Hans Holbein, and Marcantonio Raimondi. Baldus first published his own photographs in photogravure form in a three-volume publication on the architecture and ornamentation of the Louvre and Tuileries palaces that parallels his earlier photographic albums. Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries: Motifs de Decorations... must have seemed ironically timely, for while it was still being issued the Tuileries Palace and parts of the Louvre were burned down in the destruction of the 1871 Commune. Although he did not reveal the details of his process, nor enter the Duc de Luynes's competition, Baldus achieved results in photogravure that were unrivaled in their detail, smoothness of gradation. and richness.
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Encouraged by the success of his volumes on the Louvre, he published a portfolio of one hundred photogravures reproducing elements of interior and exterior decoration of the Château de Versailles and of the Grand and Petit Trianons—garden vases, statuary, fountains, paneling, moldings, consoles, tables, and so forth, as well as six exterior architectural views. With his photogravure publication Principaux Monuments de la France in the early 1870s, Baldus came full circle, issuing in gravure form a series of architectural photographs much like his Villes de France photographiées of the early 1850s, and, in a few cases, utilizing the same negatives. Baldus's last known photographic activity was a publication in the same vein as his Louvre and Versailles volumes—a collection of one hundred photo gravures of the architectural and sculptural decoration of the new Hôtel de Ville of Paris, built from 1882 to 1884 to replace the building burned down by the Commune a decade earlier.
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Baldus’s extensive publishing activity did not necessarily signal financial success. Perhaps having over extended himself in the production of Hôtel de Ville or perhaps the victim of other circumstances, Baldus transferred to his son-in-law more than seven hundred copper printing plates for the Louvre, Versailles, Hôtel de Ville, and Ducerceau gravures, and thousands of unsold prints from those publications as collateral for a small loan in October 1885, probably to protect the means of his livelihood from creditors; only fifteen months later, in January 1887 he filed for bankruptcy. Édouard Baldus died December 22, 1889, in Arcueil- Cachan, a suburb in the south of Paris. The first major exhibition devoted to the photograph of Baldus was presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, and the Musée national des monuments français, Paris, in 1994 and 1995”. (Encyclopedia 19th Century of Photographers). now a group of seventy plates have been found, they will come at auction in paris on 16 June, 2017. copages auctions, drouot.
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). photogravure plate (plaqué d’acier sur cuivre, cuivre aciéré)
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). photogravure plate (plaqué d’acier sur cuivre, cuivre aciéré)
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). photogravure plate (plaqué d’acier sur cuivre, cuivre aciéré)
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). photogravure plate (plaqué d’acier sur cuivre, cuivre aciéré)
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). beffroi d'amiens, 1855. Salt paper print, 333x260 mm, signed in the negative. Similar to the print in the Album presented to Queen Victoria, pl. 27, (Cf Malcolm Daniel, page 238). The square base was built between 1406 and 1410.
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). gare d’amiens, 1855. Salt paper print, 310x430 mm. Similar to the print in the Album presented to Queen Victoria, pl. 19, (Cf Malcolm Daniel, page 238) The station opened on 15 March 1847 when the line to Abbeville opened to passengers.
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). puits artésien de grenelle, avenue de breteuil, paris, 1864. Albumen print, 295x185 mm, signature-stamp. Registered in Bibliographie de l’Empire français, 1865. The artesian well of Grenelle was drilled between 1833 and 1841 under the impulse of Francois Arago, who proclaimed the invention of photography. The three-storey cast iron regulating tower, 43 m high, was destroyed in 1903.
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edouard baldus (1813-1889). albums de photogravures, bibliographical essay (after Malcolm daniel)
Baldus was at the forefront of developments in photomechanical reproduction, publishing seven albums of photogravure prints between 1866 and 1884. 1866. recueil d’omements, Recueil / d’ornements / d'après/ Les plus célèbres... héliogravure/ par Edouard Baldus / Paris, Rue d ’Assas, 23. The volume contained one hundred plates infolio, at a cost of 100 francs. Reproduced are works by Aldegrever, Master IB, Beham, Boyvin, de Bry, Delanne, Durer, Duccrceau, Holbein, Jansz, Lepautre, van Leyden, Marot, Solis, Vico... 1867. oeuvre de Marc-antoine raimondi Reproduites par l’héliogravure de E. Baldus / 40 planches in-folio sur papier de Hollande / Prix: 80 francs. 1869. Recueil d’Ornements, remise en vente J. Baudry (present in Fondation Jacques Doucet) 1869. oeuvre de Jacques androuet dit du cerceau, HELIOGRAVURE / par Edouard Baldus / Paris , rue d ’Assas , 17. lmp. Delâtre, rue St. Jacques 303, Paris. The Meubles series contained 32 plates in-folio at a cost of 32 francs. The Petites Arabesques series , Published in-folio for 62 francs; published in-4° for 33 francs. The Grandes Arabesques series: / 33 grandes arabesques / Série Complète./ héliogravure / par Edouard Baldus/ Paris, rue d’Assas. Published in-folio for 33 francs. An advertisement provides the following information for the Cheminées series: 20 planches in-folio, sur papier de Hollande / Prix: 20 francs. Suite en 188. 1869/1871. palais du louvre et des tuileries sous la direction de M H. LEFUEL/ Architecte de I’Empereur / Héliogravure par E. Baldus / 17, Rue d’Assas. TWO VOLUMES EDITION. Published in-folio. The series of interior decoration was issued in four installments of twentyfive prints, costing 7.50 francs; the series of exterior decoration was issued in five installments of twenty prints, costing 30 francs. A new edition, THREE VOLUMES EDITION was issued in 1875. Remise en vente : Paris / Vve A. Morelte 13 rue BONAPARTE.
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1875. les principaux monuments de la france REPRODUITS EN HELIOGRAVURE / PAR / E. BALDUS / 17, rue d'Assas / PARIS. Intended to consist of three installments of twenty prints each, at the price of 80 francs per installment. All extant copies contain only forty-five prints. 1875. Les principaux monuments de la France (remise en vente / Vve A MORELET. 1877. palais / de / versailles / — / MOTIFS DE DÉCORATIONS. GRAND ET PETIT TRIANON / MOTIFS DE DÉCORATION INTÉRIEURE ET EXTÉRIEURE 1881. Œuvre de Jacques androuet dit du cerceau : coupes, vases, trophées, cartouches, fleurons, balustrades, ferronerie, 134 planches, 254 sujets Description matérielle : 134 f. de pl. : 45 cm Description : Technique de l’image : photographie positive. - héliogravure Note : Date d’après Dépôt légal. - Adresse sur la première planche de chaque section oeuvre / de / Jacques Androuet/ dit / du cerceau / — / coupes 14 pl. / VASES 27 PL. / trophées 13 pl. / cartouches 33 pl. / fleurons 12 pl. / balustrades 20 pl. / ferronnerie 15 pl. / Total 134 planches. / héliogravure / par Edouard Baldus. 1884. reconstruction de l’hôtel de ville de paris par T. BALLU / Membre de l’Institut, Architecte en chef, et Deperthes, Architecte Motifs de décorations extérieures / SOIXANTE PLANCHES en héliogravure / par / E. Baldus. Some copies have the same title page but contain seventy plates rather than sixty. Idem, New edition, CENT PLANCHES, The title page of a two-volume set containing one hundred plates, in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. New York. The tenth print in each of the last three installments is a chromolithograph. note : within the newly found copper plates are unpublished unknown subjects, but signed in Baldus name in the engraved surface.
vente
baldus
auction
16 June 2017 14 h00 (2 pm Paris Time) drouot - salle 11 copages auction - Me patricia casini-vitalis + 33 1 40 06 91 57
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