J. Lacoste

Joseph Jean Marie Lacoste y Borde was a French-born photographer who moved to Spain in 1890. He took over Laurent y Ci?a. from Juan Laurent's stepdaughter Catalina Dosch de Roswag in 1900, and ran it up to the First World War, when he was drafted by the French armed forces. During the time he ran the company, he was, like Juan Laurent before him, an important photographer at the Museo del Prado. Many early Prado catalogues are printed with Lacoste images. Though he now controlled all the old Laurent negatives of the museum's collections, Lacoste photographed the collections again, using the new gelatin dry plate process for his negatives. The dry plate process more faithfully rendered the true colors of the paintings in the scale of grey values than the old collodion process. The collodion process reproduced reds in nature, for example, as dark grey, even black. The smaller scale of this photograph as well as the more faithful reproduction of grey values suggest that it was printed from a gelatin negative made by Lacoste sometime after 1900.

Juan Laurent, noted French photographer who resided in Spain for 43 years, established a studio in Madrid in 1856. He is recognized for his architectural and landscape scenes of Spain and Portugal as well as his extensive documentation of the collections of the Prado Museum and the Royal Armory in Madrid. By the 1860s he was the proprietor of Laurent y Cia, the largest photographic publishing house in Spain. Laurent's prints and albums were marketed to a wealthy clientele through his gallery in Paris and distributed in England by Marion & Co. of London. (Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, vol. 2, pp. 829-830).

This rare photograph is from A222, vol. 6. (loose photographs only). The six volumes comprising A222 have photographs of paintings, sculpture, architecture, archeological sites, streetscapes and landscapes of Italy and elsewhere on the "Grand Tour." 514 are mounted in albums, and 59 are individually matted. Of these 59, many like this albumen print of the Titian in the Prado, are dry-stamped "J. Lacoste - Madrid", and two (of Murillo paintings) are drystamped with an interlaced J L & C monogram, which was an earlier monogram used by the Lacoste company. This monogram was erroneously attributed to Juan Laurent in the 2004 Museo del Prado exhibition catalogue "El grafoscopio". http://library.nga.gov/imagecollections/mercury/holdingsInfo?bibId=162542 accessed 10/20/2017