MISONNE (Léonard).

"At Landelies" (1942). Mediobrome print, dated and signed in pencil in the lower left corner, mounted in a white mat and gilded wooden frame. Dim. frame : 57,5 x 47 cm ; subject : 38,5 x 28,5 cm. Leonard Missonne (1870-1943), the most internationally known Belgian photographer, paradoxically never left the small town of Gilly, near Charleroi. In 1896, he became a member of the Association Belge de Photographie, an important society of amateur photographers that had been growing remarkably in recent years and had a solid reputation among foreign societies. By the rigor of his work and the quality of his prints, Misonne became from 1900 one of the leaders of an international movement, the school of artistic photography (pictorialism), for which the importance lay in the final image and not in a retranscription of reality. For his classically inspired photographs (mainly landscapes and scenes of workers or peasants), he developed the mediobrome process, a derivative of bromoil. This chemical process involves working with pigments in the print, which allows for manipulation of the final image. In Misonne's case, the purpose of this manipulation was to play with the light in order to give a very particular atmosphere to his images. His landscapes and street portraits are full of that unreal light of after storms that we often find in Belgium.