FEATURES ARCHIVE

Alfred Stieglitz, the leading figure of the international pictorialist movement in photography and a powerful force in the development of modern art in America, recognized that Adolph de Meyer’s Water Lilies was one of the most important images of that era. Not only did he select it for publication in his deluxe review Camera Work and for exhibition in his gallery, but he also acquired a print for his own collection. Accompanying the reproductions of this photograph, and six others by de Meyer, in the October 1908 issue of the review are Stieglitz’s words of high praise: “His work is original, full of individuality, has strength and delicacy combined, and above all is distingué.”

Beauty in the Details
In 1903, de Meyer began working with a special hand-ground lens made by Pinkham & Smith. Unlike a diffusion filter which blurs everything, the hand-ground lens softens and diffuses both shadow areas, and paradoxically maintains general image clarity while softening the hard edges. The effect is a luminous quality, a well-known attribute of the Pinkham & Smith lens, which suggests it was used to create this photograph.

This careful attention to detail underscores the high quality and unique character of each of de Meyer’s prints. Extremely rare, there are only two other known extant prints of Water Lilies and only one of those is on platinum paper, the print that Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1933.

An Extraordinary Coincidence: Two Rare Prints of Water Lilies
In addition to the above platinum print, Christie’s is offering the only known gelatin silver print of Water Lilies in the October 8 auction of The Miller-Plummer Collection of Photographs. Specialist Stuart Alexander comments, “I encourage Photographs enthusiasts to attend our pre-sale exhibition to compare these two beautiful and subtly varied prints in person.”