Thursday, November 10, the auction house Millon must disperse in Paris a rare fund of old photos: the collection gathered by François Lepage, a dealer who helped write the history of photography. Are offered signed prints of the “primitives” of photography (before 1860) and many rarities never encountered: “Apart from two photos that François Lepage had loaned for exhibitions and books, most of the photographs have never been shown, and all the major collectors have come to see the piecessays the expert Christophe Gœury. François Lepage has collected only extremely beautiful prints, of museum quality. »
Among the remarkable images in the sale, one is famous: a print by Félix Nadar (1820-1910) and his brother Adrien Tournachon (1825-1903), Pierrot with fruit basket (1854-1855), taken from the series produced with the mime Deburau (1796-1846) and which caused a sensation at the time – it was exhibited in a landmark exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in 1994, and is estimated between 120,000 and 150,000 euros. There are also, at high prices, several of the great historical authors of photography: a landscape by Edouard Baldus (1813-1889), between 25,000 and 30,000 euros, a melancholy seascape by Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) , Sun in clouds effect–Ocean (1856), estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 euros.
Christophe Gœury, expert: “François Lepage has only collected extremely beautiful prints, of museum quality”
But the sale also highlights the lesser-known passions of a secret dealer, who together with his colleagues, in the 1970s and 1980s, traced the first steps of the pioneers of photography and identified the important images. “He is someone who was building his collection at the same time as he was contributing to writing a facet of the history of photography”, summarizes Sylvie Aubenas, director of the department of prints and photography at the National Library of France, one of the few to have known him closely.
From his flea market in Saint-Ouen, François Lepage worked, from the 1960s, to unearth, buy, identify authors and their forgotten prints, often stored in attics and threatened to end up in the trash. Following André Jammes, a famous dealer in old photos whose mythical collection reached stratospheric prices at a sale in 1999, François Lepage was part of the clique of “French amateurs” in the 1970s, according to words of historian Eugenia Parry: a group of passionate merchants which included Gérard Lévy, who was for a time the partner of François Lepage, and the “TexBraun”, a duo composed of François Braunschweig and Hugues Autexier, whose shop was close to that of François Lepage at the Saint-Ouen flea market.
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