ART MARKET / Up for sale
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Your support makes all the difference.SOME OF THE first 'naughty' photographs evertaken are coming up for sale at Christie's on 20 October. Louis Daguerre momentously announced his invention of photography in France in 1839 - the same year that a similar process was announced by W H Fox Talbot in England. Christie's has a group of stereoscopic daguerrotypes for sale, each of them depicting a naked or partly clothed French belle of the 1850s - only 10 years or so later. Their price estimates range
from pounds 2,500 to pounds 5,000. The two illustrated here are estimated at pounds 4,000- pounds 5,000.
Daguerrotypes are unique images printed without the use of a negative on to silvered copper plates. These 'stereoscopic' daguerrotypes come with dual images since they were intended to be viewed through a special stereoscopic viewer which made the image appear three-dimensional. They have also been carefully tinted by hand to make the girls look more alluring.
The daguerrotypes come from a famous collection of nude photographs built up by Uwe Scheid, a German industrialist. He has published several books on his collection and contributed to many exhibitions. Christie's has 120 photographs from the Scheid collection for sale, ranging from a daguerrotype of a Female nude reclining on a chaise longue, which is dated June 1845, to arty prints of the 1930s. Though girls predominate, there are also some boys revealing their private parts, notably two 19th-century Italians cavorting in front of a marble frieze of Roman worthies (estimate pounds 350- pounds 450).
Scheid is best known for his collection of nude photographs, of which these are only a small part, but he also formed a collection of photographs of dogs; Christie's sold a selection of these images under the title 'Dogs in Focus' in May 1992, with predictable success. Christie's tell me that Uwe Scheid is now getting interested in cars.
(Photographs omitted)
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