Creator
Émile Gsell
French photographer whose 1866 views of Angkor Wat and portraits of King Norodom's court are among the earliest photographs of Cambodia.
Émile Gsell (1838 to 1879) was a French photographer in Saigon who took some of the earliest photographs of Cambodia.[1] In 1866 he photographed Angkor Wat for the French Mekong expedition, and around 1870 he photographed the court of King Norodom in Phnom Penh.[2][3]
Life
Army and Saigon
Gsell was born at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in Alsace at the end of December 1838.[1][4] He began his military service around 1858 and most likely learned photography in the army. He left it in 1865 or 1866 and stayed in Saigon to open a studio.[1] He had his studio by October 1866, the first professional photographer in Saigon.[2] It stood on the rue Rigault de Genouilly, today Nguyễn Huệ Street.[1]
Angkor, 1866
Ernest Doudart de Lagrée, who led the French commission exploring the Mekong, asked Gsell to come with it as its photographer, and Gsell was released from military duties for the work.[2] The party reached Angkor on elephants on June 24, 1866, and left on July 1.[2] Gsell photographed the expedition's principal members on the steps of Angkor Wat. He was the second photographer at Angkor, a few months after the Scottish photographer John Thomson.[1] At Phnom Penh he also photographed King Norodom and his court.[1]
The oldest known advertisement for his studio, of September 20, 1866, offered his large views of the ruins of Angkor for sale.[1] He printed a catalog of about 163 of his photographs of Angkor.[2] In 1867 Admiral Rigault de Genouilly presented an album of his photographs to Empress Eugénie. The album, Cochinchine et Cambodge, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1][5]
Later journeys
The historian Terry Bennett thinks Gsell made several more trips to Phnom Penh and Angkor in the late 1860s and early 1870s, perhaps as a guide and photographer for visitors.[1] In 1871 the governor of Cochinchina, Marie Jules Dupré, wrote that Gsell would come with him to Angkor Wat.[1] In 1873 Gsell asked to go with Louis Delaporte's mission to the Khmer monuments. Bautze writes that he returned to Angkor with it in the second half of 1873, while Bennett doubts that the request succeeded.[2][1]
He sent two albums to the Vienna World's Fair of 1873, one on the ruins of Angkor and one on the peoples of Cochinchina and Cambodia, and received a medal of merit.[2] He later won a silver medal at the Cochinchina exhibition of 1874 and a bronze medal at the Paris World's Fair of 1878.[1] In April 1875 he went with a French mission to Huế, where he was not allowed to photograph the emperor or the citadel. From November 1876 to January 1877 he went up the Red River to Lào Cai with the consul Alexandre Le Jumeau de Kergaradec.[1]
Death
Gsell died suddenly at his house and studio in Saigon on October 16, 1879, at 40.[1][2] He was unmarried, and his estate went to his parents in Paris. Other photographers took over his studio and negatives, and his stock was dispersed in 1884. His only known negatives were found in the 1990s and given to the Musée Guimet in Paris in 1997.[1]
Work
Angkor
Gsell's 1866 photographs show Angkor Wat overgrown and still home to Buddhist monks. The Metropolitan Museum's album holds views of its galleries and towers and of the monks' quarters.[5][6] Wood engravings after his photographs illustrated Francis Garnier's account of the Mekong expedition (1871) and Delaporte's Voyage au Cambodge (1880). Delaporte wrote that most of the photographic views placed in the museum came from Gsell's rich collection, and that he drew on it several times for his book.[2]
The court of King Norodom
In Phnom Penh, Gsell photographed King Norodom, his family and his officials. The 1866 album includes the king, his brother and a prince with his retinue.[7][8][9] The Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna holds 201 of his prints, dated about 1870, 200 of them given by the French Ministry of the Navy. Of these, 75 show Cambodia: King Norodom, the queen, princes and ministers, the palace and Phnom Penh, Battambang and the court's women musicians, actresses and dancers.[3][10][11][12] Around 1870 to 1871 he took the first photographs of the mohaori orchestra of King Norodom's court: a view of the whole ensemble and portraits of all but one of its women musicians, each with her instrument.[13]
Legacy
By the early twentieth century Gsell's name was forgotten, though his views of Angkor were still printed.[2] Bautze, writing in 2012, found that Thomson ranks among the most celebrated photographers while Gsell "seems almost to be forgotten".[2] His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Weltmuseum Wien, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Université Côte d'Azur.[5][3][4][1]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 Humazur, Université Côte d'Azur, Émile Gsell (1838-1879) (in French, undated)
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 Joachim K. Bautze, Émile Gsell and early photographs of Angkor, in Connecting Empires (2012), pp. 306-315
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Weltmuseum Wien, Online collection: Émile Gsell (undated)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gsell, Emile (1838-1879), authority record (in French, undated)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Émile Gsell, Cochinchine et Cambodge (1866)
- ↑ Metropolitan Museum of Art, Émile Gsell, Bonzerie de la Grande Pagode (1866)
- ↑ Metropolitan Museum of Art, Émile Gsell, S. M. Norodon, Roi du Cambodge (1866)
- ↑ Metropolitan Museum of Art, Émile Gsell, Phra-Kéo-Pha, Frère du Roi (1866)
- ↑ Metropolitan Museum of Art, Émile Gsell, Prince Cambodgien et son Cortège (1866)
- ↑ Weltmuseum Wien, Émile Gsell, Cambodschanische Musiker (in German, about 1870)
- ↑ Weltmuseum Wien, Émile Gsell, Schauspielerinnen (in German, about 1870)
- ↑ Weltmuseum Wien, Émile Gsell, Tänzerin (in German, about 1870)
- ↑ Sounds of Angkor, The Khmer mahori orchestra (in French, December 2, 2023)