Léonard Misonne “glabais,” 1940, Bromoil Print, 29x39 Cm

 Leonard MISONNE (1870–1943)
Léonard Misonne was the seventh son of Louis Misonne, a lawyer and industrialist, and Adèle Pirmez. He studied mining engineering at the Catholic University of Louvain but never practiced as an engineer. While still a student, he developed an interest in music, painting, and, beginning in 1891, photography, on which he focused exclusively starting in 1896. Misonne took several trips to Switzerland, Germany, and France. He made a name for himself with his reworked lighting effects. “The subject is nothing; light is everything,” he asserted. Misonne is known for his sense of atmosphere, but his approach has been labeled, from an artistic standpoint, as conservative and sentimental [citation needed]. His blurred effects, reminiscent of Impressionism, earned him the nickname “the Corot of photography.” Misonne initially worked with the photographic process using a suspension of silver bromide in gelatin, which he learned in 1910 in Paris from Constant Puyo, and later used the direct carbon print process developed by Théodore-Henri Fresson. This technique allowed him to print his photographs directly without having to transfer them from glass to paper. He became an internationally renowned leader of Pictorialism and a well-known figure in avant-garde circles. Most of his photographs were taken in Belgium and the Netherlands; they are mainly landscapes, sometimes beach scenes and views of Ghent and Antwerp. He developed the mediobrome, a variant of bromoil, which he used from 1935 to 1943.