Charles Aubry worked as a decorative arts designer before turning to photography in the 1860s. His meticulously arranged still-life studies of foliage and flowers were intended to serve as aids for designers in the creation of fabrics and wallpaper. Aubry’s complex arrangements, constructed especially for the camera, strike a balance between the verdant chaos of nature and the organizing hand of man. In his still lifes, Aubry exploited the ability of glass-plate negatives to capture detail, and the clarion quality of the resulting images may have surpassed the requirements of their intended purpose. Viewed today, the beautifully photographed tableau offered here ranks as a masterpiece in the still-life genre, both in painting and photography.

In the 20th century, Aubry’s images came to be appreciated as works of photographic art. In 1985, the J. Paul Getty Museum exhibited his work in The Flower Show: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum Selected by Sam Wagstaff, and in the 1988 exhibition The Flowering of Early French Photography. John Szarkowski included Aubry in his landmark 1989 exhibition Photography Until Now and the accompanying catalogue. Illustrations of Aubry’s photographs appear in Bruce Bernard’s 1980 book, Photodiscovery: Masterworks of Photography 1840-1940, and on the cover of Fraenkel Gallery’s 1989 publication, The Insistent Object: Photographs 1845-1986.