Robert Demachy

After his birth his family returned to their mansion at 13 Rue François Premier in Paris, where Demachy continued to live for the next fifty years.

His father stayed in Paris as part of the Commune and the Banque Demachy played an important role in financing the resistance efforts.

In the mid-1870s he began frequenting the artists’ cafés and, perhaps in rebellion to his gentrified life, he became involved in the growing bohemian culture that was beginning to take hold in Paris.

Within a few years he became frustrated with the conservative views of many of the photographers around him, and in 1888 he joined with Maurice Bucquet to form the new Photo-club de Paris.

In 1889, while visiting the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he met a young woman from Detroit, Michigan, named Julia Adelia Delano.

In 1897 he published his first book, with co-author Alfred Maskell, Photo-aquatint or Gum Bichromate Process (London: Hazell, Watson & Vinery).

Anderson wrote “of a truth, Robert Demachy is not a man, he is a miracle.”[1] Each of these shows marked a new high point in his career, and at each he gave an opening address to the membership of the Society.

He greatly enjoyed talking about both the technical and aesthetic aspects of his work, and he took advantage of every opportunity to engage other photographers in serious discussions the progress of photography as an art form.

In 1904 six of his photographs, three photogravures and three half-tones were published in Alfred Stieglitz’s famous journal Camera Work, accompanied by a review by Joseph Keiley.

[4] This same year he began experimenting with the Rawlins oil process, a relatively new printing method that allowed extensive reworking of the image.

In his many writings Demachy took great care to point out that just knowing how to use the technique of image manipulation was not enough to automatically make a photograph a work of art.

At the invitation of the Society, he and Puyo selected the French entries for the London Photographic Salon that year, and he included more than twenty of his own images in the show.

This situation led to increasing resentment by Adelia, since she was surrounded by Demachy’s mother, her in-laws and her children in their mansion yet she rarely saw her husband because of his preoccupation with photography.

He preferred the company of bohemian painters or the enjoyment of the simple countryside, and he was not comfortable in higher class social circles.

He continued to make sketches, and at one point he reported that he was amused that he had been questioned as a possible spy when he was drawing pictures near Le Havre.

When his mother died in 1916, Demachy finally sold the mansion and moved into an apartment at 12 Cité Malesherbes in the old artists' quarter of Montmartre.

His only artistic endeavor for the rest of his life was driving his classic car to the beach where he made sketches of heavy-set women swimmers in the water.