PARIS.- As France celebrates the bicentennial of photography and Paris Photo, the leading international fair dedicated to photography and the image, prepares to welcome collectors from around the world, Christie's is honoured to present more than 350 photographs from the legendary Roger Therond Collection across three sales taking place in Paris on 13 and 14 November, and online from 6 to 17 November. Roger Therond belonged to the highly exclusive circle of the five greatest photography collectors of his time, alongside figures such as Marion Lambert and Thomas Walther, a “generation of explorers with a passion for adventure.” […] They were instrumental in sparking a renewed interest in photography. “Their efforts restored to simple objects of curiosity, often neglected, the dignity and brilliance of treasures,” as Pierre Apraxine wrote in the foreword to Une passion franaise. Photographies de la collection Roger Therond (Filipacchi Editions, 1999).
A journalist and the iconic editor of Paris Match for half a century, Roger Therond assembled over the decades a collection bringing together an unprecedented group of masterpieces of 19th- and 20th-century French photography. While Therond devoted himself to the most pressing current events in the pages of Paris Match, the collector sought escape, authenticity and poetry, developing a passion for a photographic medium that revealed hidden worlds. His earliest acquisitions focused on photographs from the very origins of the medium, images that bore witness to vanished worlds whose “forgotten 19th-century fragrance filled his home”. The collection thus invites viewers on a journey: from Egypt and Nubia in the 1850s through the Orient of Flix Teynard, to the vanished Paris of Eugne Atget and the unexplored mountains captured by the Bisson Brothers, before answering the call of the sea in the seascapes of Gustave Le Gray. Later, this fascination with first-generation prints and proofs, whose “rough texture and charm delighted the fingertips”, expanded to encompass the experimental achievements of the 20th century by those who shaped the history of photography, from Man Ray and Dora Maar to Brassa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helmut Newton, and Guy Bourdin, photographers who were friends of the collector, as well as Maurice Tabard and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, among his closest companions.
The birth of photography: An invitation to travel
At the heart of the Roger Therond Collection lies a remarkable journey through the earliest chapters of photographic history. Collectors and connoisseurs alike will encounter an extraordinary ensemble of works by the great pioneers of the 19th century, from Auguste Belloc and Gustave Le Gray to douard Baldus and Nadar. Bayard's first photographic experiments on paper, some of the earliest daguerreotypes, including those by Baron Louis Gros, tienne-Jules Marey's groundbreaking chronophotographs, a posed portrait of Gros and the scientist photographed alongside his sphygmograph, all bear witness to the spirit of invention, curiosity and artistic ambition that animated photography's beginnings.
Among these visionary figures, Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) occupies a singular place. His celebrated seascapes, born from a technical mastery that allowed him to unite sky and sea through the combination of two negatives, remain among the most poetic achievements of early photography. They also echo Roger Therond's enduring attachment to his native Mediterranean coast and to the port city of Ste, where his own story began. More than images, these luminous horizons embody the grandeur, mystery and boundless promise of the photographic medium itself.
Collectors will have the opportunity to acquire more than a dozen works by the artist, including Marine, Bateau quittant le port (€500,000-700,000), Le Port du Havre, 1856 (€300,000-400,000), Ciel charg, mer Mditerrane, 1857 (€80,000-100,000), and Pont du Carrousel, vu du pont des Arts, Paris, 1856-1858 (€80,000-120,000).
The highlight of the sale is an exceptional ensemble of fifty albumen prints, produced in 1867 and 1868 and mounted on card, recounting a Voyage in Upper Egypt undertaken for the sons of Ismal Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt. Inscribed in ink by Le Gray's own hand, these photographs form a rare and intimate testament to one of the final great adventures of the photographer's career (estimate: €800,000-1,200,000).
The journey continues eastward into a world of myth and discovery with the personal album of Flix Teynard (1817-1892), comprising 160 photographic plates from his celebrated gypte et Nubie (1858), published by H. Fonteny in Paris and bequeathed to his son, Sixte, accompanied by a handwritten note requesting that the work be bound in two volumes (€300,000-500,000). Conceived as a photographic counterpart to the monumental Description de l'gypte, Teynard's project sought to extend, through the lens, the great scholarly enterprise born of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.
A diplomat, traveller and enlightened amateur, Baron Louis Gros (1793-1870) was among the earliest practitioners of the daguerreotype. In his hands, the Acropolis of Athens shed its classical familiarity to become something dreamlike and timeless: a lunar landscape, solitary and weathered by the centuries, suspended between antiquity and modernity (€60,000-80,000).
Photography and painting: A dialogue that continues to resonate
Among the many qualities that make Roger Therond's collection such an exceptional scholarly landmark are those pivotal moments in the history of photography when the medium asserted itself as an art form in its own right, no longer content merely to record the visible world. As Roger Therond himself observed: *“There were the travelling photographers, but those who remained became princes of their studios. And as soon as photography became reproducible, commerce seized upon portraiture. The subject became little more than an object. Yet before its encounter with money, portraiture had its encounter with art. Nadar [...] saw men as they were, and as he himself was.”*
The power of the portraits created by Adrien Tournachon (1825-1903) and his brother Nadar (Flix Tournachon, 1820-1910) lies precisely in this artistic ambition. Stripped of artifice, their images reveal an uncommon intimacy with their sitters. From Nadar's Self-Portrait with his Wife Ernestine and their Son (€10,000-15,000), to the portrait of his friend Alexandre Dumas (€10,000-15,000), and the strikingly theatrical Mime Deburau Grimacing, circa 1855 (€20,000-30,000), these photographs elevate portraiture beyond likeness into psychological revelation.
The exploration of the human figure also led nineteenth-century photographers into the realm of the nude. Among the most daring was Auguste Belloc (1805-1873), a pioneer of the academic nude whose work deftly navigated the border between sensuality and the traditions of fine art. Though he largely succeeded in circumventing the moral restrictions of his era, he could not entirely escape official scrutiny. In October 1860, the morality police seized more than 5,000 photographs and stereoscopic views from his home, judged to be "obscene". Only a handful of the images that once circulated discreetly "under the counter" survive today. Dating from 1850, two of Belloc's nude-photography albums, dedicated in gold lettering to Humbert de Molard in what might be described as a gift from one alchemist to another, stand among the rarest survivors of this lost corpus (€200,000-300,000).
Suspended between photography and painting, Eugne Cuvelier (1837-1900) emerges as one of the great poets of the nineteenth-century landscape. His photographs, deeply imbued with atmosphere and light, are thought to have inspired artists of the Barbizon School. Roger Therond recognized their significance long before international retrospectives elevated Cuvelier to the rank of one of photography's great primitives. Among the exquisite salt prints included in the sale are the haunting Dead Hare (€30,000-50,000) and A Plough (€20,000-30,000), works whose quiet lyricism transforms humble subjects into timeless meditations on nature and rural life.
Another Century, Other Journeys
Spanning the full chronology of the photographic medium, the Roger Therond Collection continues its explorations into the artistic adventures of the twentieth century. Eugne Atget (1857-1927) stands at the threshold of modernity, his photographs capturing a world on the verge of disappearance. The uncanny stillness of his streets and his tender attention to the everyday are vividly reflected in Maison Close, Versailles, 1921, and Rue Asselin, Paris, 1921 (each €80,000-100,000). These images mark photography's gradual departure from mere representation toward a more poetic and subjective vision.
At the crossroads of documentary observation and avant-garde experimentation, Germaine Krull (1897-1985) brought a radically modern eye to the rapidly changing urban landscape. Her daring compositions and fascination with industrial structures find powerful expression in Elevator of the Eiffel Tower (1926) (€10,000-15,000), a vertiginous image that celebrates the dynamism of a city being reshaped by technology.
Among the most innovative voices of the 1920s and 1930s, Florence Henri (1893-1982) pursued an aesthetic of remarkable formal rigor. Through reflections, geometric constructions and subtle shifts in perspective, her photographs edge towards abstraction. Such is the case with Foire de Paris, 1931 (€15,000-25,000), and Pont Transbordeur, Marseille, 1930 (€10,000-15,000), works that reveal a world reordered through the language of modernist form.
A final gallery of portraits by Man Ray (1890-1976) evokes the dazzling constellation of personalities who animated interwar Paris. Here appear Kiki de Montparnasse (1924, €80,000-100,000), Peggy Guggenheim in a dress (1924-25, €30,000-50,000), Max Ernst (circa 1935, €25,000-35,000), and Marcel Duchamp Playing Chess, inscribed in the artist's hand, Rrose Slavy (1925, €30,000-50,000). Together, these portraits form a pantheon of modernity, capturing not only the faces of an era, but also the extraordinary creative energy that transformed Paris into the capital of the avant-garde.
From Man Ray, whom Roger Therond affectionately nicknamed “the Frenzied One”, the collector was especially drawn to Le Baiser (The Kiss) (€250,000-350,000). Depicting two sitters, including Lee Miller on the left, the image opens itself entirely to the viewer's imagination. Therond would invite his children to step back and look again: “A man and a woman? Two women? Two men wearing make-up? Let us not try to know. Instead, let us half-close our eyes and allow into our field of vision the black-clad Gypsy woman who emerges, beyond the photographer's intention, a dancing silhouette whose skirt billows like a corolla. And where are we? In another world, the world of the strange, the world of the unknown.” The photograph becomes less a portrait than a vision, suspended between reality and reverie.
With Legs (1 and 2) by Dora Maar (1907-1997), whose bold and unconventional framing draws directly upon visual possibilities first explored by Man Ray, the collection firmly situates itself within the inventive and experimental spirit of Surrealism (1935, €200,000-300,000).
Straddling documentary photography, Surrealist imagination and the artistic avant-garde of the 1930s, Dora Maar occupies a central place in the sale through a group of works that reveal the remarkable diversity of her visual language, imbued with an unsettling sense of mystery. Among them are the striking Picasso with Bull's Skull (1937, €40,000-60,000) and Figurine pour le 29 rue d'Astorg (1936), the image that would later serve as the point of departure for the celebrated photomontage 29 rue d'Astorg (€50,000-70,000).
Finally, Mannequin toile (circa 1935) stands as one of Dora Maar's most poetic creations. Poised between dream and enigma, it achieved iconic status when the Centre Pompidou selected it for the poster of its major 2019 retrospective devoted to the artist (€100,000-150,000). Like so many photographs in Roger Therond's collection, it reminds us that the history of photography is not merely a history of images, but of visions: of artists who transformed the visible world into a realm of possibility, ambiguity and wonder.
Roger Therond's Photographer Friends
Among the photographers he counted as friends, Roger Therond held a particular affection for “Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the Blessed” and “Maurice Tabard, the Secret One,” as he liked to call them. *“Lartigue was my friend. Tabard too, I knew him well; we were almost neighbours. He was shy, withdrawn. He was afraid of people, of crowds; he worked quietly on his own. In every field, he somehow remained in the shadow of the great names, always overtaken by someone else, perhaps because he never quite believed in himself. I always loved his work. I was moved by the sense of solitude that defines it. He was something of a 'Mr Unlucky', but he deserves better. I would like his time to come at last.”*
A selection of around ten works from the collection invites viewers to rediscover the most fertile and inventive years of Maurice Tabard's career following his return from the United States. It was then that he developed the distinctive visual language that would establish him as one of the leading figures of European Surrealist photography. His Surimpression (Double Exposure), 1929 (€30,000-50,000), perfectly illustrates the process that fascinated him and would become one of the defining techniques of the Surrealists. In Tabard's hands, photography ceased merely to describe the world; it became a space where realities overlap, dissolve and reinvent themselves.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue's universe, by contrast, is illuminated by an enduring sense of joy and wonder. Warm, playful and often delightfully humorous, his photographs seem dedicated to preserving life's happiest moments from the passage of time. Such is the case with the celebrated image of his cousin Andr Haguet, known as Dd, diving into a lake in 1911 (€20,000-30,000), a photograph that captures both the exhilaration of movement and the carefree spirit of youth. Equally enchanting is the image of Guitty, the cousin of his father's secretary, seen from behind as she runs along the beach at Biarritz in 1905. Lartigue was only eleven years old when he made the photograph, yet its spontaneity and grace already reveal the singular eye that would define his oeuvre (€20,000-30,000).
Roger Therond also acquired three prints depicting Rene, one of the most captivating figures to inhabit Lartigue's photographic world. Celebrated throughout his work for her extraordinary beauty, she appears in a portrait of 1931 that perfectly embodies the elegance, lightness and effortless charm that so fascinated the photographer (€25,000-35,000). Through these images, Lartigue transforms fleeting moments into lasting enchantment, preserving not only faces and gestures, but a vision of life touched by happiness itself.
Note: * All quotations by Roger Therond are drawn from the exhibition catalogue Une passion franaise – Photographies de la collection Roger Therond, ditions Filipacchi, 1999
