Media Environments: Manet, Cros and the Colours of Spring

Abstract

This article revisits an obscure episode in the early history of colour photography, the collaboration between poet and inventor Charles Cros and painter Édouard Manet. I consider the genesis of a colour photographic copy of Manet’s Jeanne (Le Printemps) painting of 1882, a work featured in the recent exhibition Manet and Modern Beauty. I argue that more can be said about the intermedial layers of this experiment from a social, historical and theoretical perspective. Based on letters previously unexamined in the scholarship, I provide additional historical context about the experiment and reveal that it was not a one-off whim of the inventor, but rather a project that involved Jules Carpentier, the engineer who, among other achievements, would go on to collaborate with the Lumière brothers in building their cinématographe camera. Finally, I consider more closely the sentiments expressed by Cros in a letter to Manet about the experiment, sentiments that, I argue, help open onto broader questions about the progress of chemistry at that historical moment. I conclude with a theoretical question about the incunabula of new technologies and their connections to an ‘environmental unconscious’.