Photo by Victor Prevost of Central Park, d1862
8" x 10"

Victor Prevost
(Sources: nyhistory.org, wiki, 19thshop.com) In 1962, Victor Prevost became one of the first official photographers of Central Park. One of the earliest photographers to work in New York, Prevost studied photography in France under Paul Delaroche and with Gustave Le Gray. In 1850 Prevost came to New York and established a studio at Broadway and Bleecker. He achieved limited commercial success, giving up photography as a career in 1857. Prevost continued to take photographs of major construction projects in New York City, the most important of which are his images of the new Central Park.

These images are among the earliest extant photographs of the construction of Central Park. The Olmsted-Vaux plan was accepted in 1858, and work began at once, but it was not until the 1870s that the immense project was completed. As a result, these very early photographs present an unfamiliar view of the park, with immature plantings, temporary structures, worker housing, all without the towering buildings that figure prominently in later images.

Prevost spent most of his career in New York where, during the 1850s, he operated a photography studio. His calotype negatives survive as rare examples of some of the earliest paper photographs of New York City. Prevost learned the calotype process of using sensitized waxed paper to make photographic negatives from Gustave LeGray while visiting France in 1853. Upon his return to New York in the fall of that year, Prevost opened a photography studio at 627 Broadway between Houston and Bleecker Streets, with P.C. Duchochois as his partner. They were among the few photographers in the United States producing calotypes commercially but, due to increasing competition, they closed the business in 1855.

French-born Victor Prevost (1820-1881) is one of the earliest photographers to work in New York City.

Prevost was born in La Rochelle, France. He studied in France under Paul Delaroche, and learned complicated photographic printing techniques from fellow student, Gustave Le Gray. However, after setting up his own studio on Broadway and Bleecker Street (he emigrated in 1850), Prevost failed to become a commercial success. After 1857, Prevost taught art and physics in various schools.

Prevosts landscapes are a subtle, and rather idiosyncratic mix of the documentary and aesthetic traditions. Aside from a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2003, his work has gone largely unknown by a contemporary public, though numerous large institutions have long collected his work.

The bulk of the artists oeuvre resides in the George Eastman House, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Historical Society (though the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., amongst others, also own prints and negatives).

Good condition overall