Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Two Women)

c. 1880s

Femmes musulmanes Syriennes à Beyrouth, Costume de Ville (Two Women), c. 1880s. Félix Bonfils (French, 1831–1885). Photochrom; image: 22.4 x 16.3 cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/16 in.); mounted: 26.6 x 18.1 cm (10 1/2 x 7 1/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of William and Margaret Lipscomb 2021.208.b To make a photochrom, a photographic negative was transferred onto a lithographic stone, then printers created a minimum of six and up to fifteen different stones, each with a single color of ink, which were printed atop the black-and-white image. The printers creating the colors had never seen the original locale. Photochroms were popular from the 1890s into the 1910s and were most often collected in albums or framed and hung on the wall. In the early 1880s, Félix Bonfils was among the first photographers to use the Photocrom process, which produced color images from a single black-and-white negative.