Study After Nature [Étude d'après nature],

ca. 1875

To complete a painted canvas with figures, artists often worked from rough hand-drawn sketches made from live models. They soon discovered that photography could produce a brilliant likeness in a fraction of the time. Photographic aides-mémoires, or memory aids, were in high demand in French artistic circles, indicating the thorough interdependency of photography and painting in the late nineteenth century. By the 1870s, French publishers such as Giraudon and Calavas commissioned photographs of models, both clothed and nude, to aid in the creation of future painted canvases.