Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Évrard pursued William Henry Fox Talbot's
negative/positive experiments and by 1851 was confident enough
to open a factory in the outskirts of Lille, in northern France,
that cleared the way to mass-producing photographs in the same
quantities as traditional prints. At last, photography could
hope to succeed as both art and industry. A frequent
collaborator of Blanquart-Évrard, Marville contributed more than
one hundred photographs, mostly architectural views, to the
publisher's many portfolios. This image is somewhat atypical of
Marville's oeuvre. Its atmosphere of intimacy and nonchalance
evokes the achievements of the wealthy amateur photographers of
the time more than the severe architectural views usually
associated with Marville. However, it was published in
Blanquart-Évrard's album, Études photographiques (1853), the
title of which suggests that such pictures were intended as
studies for artists.