The Lumière process for colour photography was one of the earliest and most successful. The brothers began experimenting with colour photography during the 1890s, and in 1895 introduced and patented a subtractive colour process which used sheets of paper coated with bichromated gelatin glue and small amounts of silver bromide.

The initial process was time consuming and complicated, requiring more than twelve hours to expose the three coated papers (yellow, cayan and magenta) under three separation negatives, develop the complimentary colours, superimpose and then fix the three images onto glass. The Lumières launched a new Autochrome plate in 1907 (patented 1904), with immediate success; in 1909 the brothers received the Royal Photographic Society's Progress medal for their process, which was amongst the first available commercially.

Early colour photography using the Lumière subtractive process was characterised by the richness of its colours. At the 1900 Paris Exhibition, the Lumière brothers demonstrated their process with colour prints on paper, which were said to have a 'richness of colouring and luminosity that far exceeded all their previous work'. This distinctive luminosity also exceeded other contemporary colour processes, the bright colours often resembling hand-tinted photographs

The slides in this lot probably date to before 1907 when the Lumières began large-scale commercial production of their colour plates using the autochrome process, which was marketed as Plaques Autochromes or Autochromes Lumière, rather than the Photographie des Coleurs found here. The letter A and four-digit number hand-written on many of these slides suggest that this was possibly a commercial series produced in limited numbers. The glass-house which was used as a studio can be seen as a reflection in many of the interior sets.