The Wallraf-Richartz Museum presents Drawn by Light. Camille Corot and his ‘Cliché-Verre’ Experiments, open through 24 October 2010.
Literally meaning “glass picture”, cliché-verre was a popular method between 1850 and 1870 – not least among French landscape painters such as Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny – of employing light-sensitive paper to duplicate pastoral landscapes drawn on glass. Purely with the help of the light, a drawing scratched into a specially coated glass plate could be transferred to the paper. In some ways cliché-verre marked “the zero point” in the graphic arts during the second half of the 19th century.
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