Photography

[Physionotrace] Hessell

Carl Wilhelm von Woelckern auf Kalchreuth geboren 1728 den 21ten October 1793 fünf und zwantig jahr. Pfleger zu Altdorf.

Gez. u Gest. H. Hessell. Plate mark 15 x 9 cm. The whole sheet 25,5 x 16,5 cm. Aquatint.

At the verso there is the blue collectors stamp of Christian Hammer. One of the greatest swedish collectors in the 19th. century. A little residue of paper strips in two corners at the verso, after an earlier mounting. Nice condition.

A portrait of Carl Wilhelm von Woelckern. The remarkable thing about this portrait is that it was probably executed in the rare physionotrace technique. It looks and has all the caharcteristics of a physionotrace, but there is no mentioning of the method on the plate. The physionotrace technique was invented in the mid 1780s. by the frenchman Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1745 - 1811). The present one was executed by Leonhard Heinrich Hessell (1756 - 1819) which means that this is a german physionotrace. A very rare thing to find. Most examples are french. Hessell used his own method called the "Hessellischen Treffer", a development of the french method. A physionotrace was executed by a mechanical device capturing a profile in a very detailed way. The physionotrace is regarded as an important stepping stone toward the development of photography. No machine is preserved to this day, just a sketch in the Bibliotheque National in Paris. Its history is brief from its invention in the 1780s to its disappearance in the early 18th. century. Accordingly, physionotrace images are very rare today. Few countries outside France produced these kind of images, Germany and the United States being two of them.

Item No: 3501