A nude girl reclines on a tumble of material, a flower in her hair and bracelet on her wrist, frankly difficult the viewer along with her gaze. It’s nearly Manet’s Olympia, however not fairly. This {photograph} is an Autochrome, the method invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1904 and explored by the Observer Journal on 2 November 1980, with lately unearthed pictures from the French Photographic Society.

Autochrome was an early reply to frustration on the limitations of pictures in capturing the color and complexity of actual life and its secret was an ‘unlikely ingredient’: potato starch. ‘Minute grains of starch had been dyed in main colors, rigorously blended and held on a glass plate with silver bromide answer.’

It was immediately widespread and the Lumière brothers struggled to satisfy demand, significantly from the Pictorialists, pioneers who seen pictures as an artwork type stuffed with risk relatively than a documentary course of. They appreciated Autochrome because it ‘gave an impact of shimmering color harking back to that achieved by probably the most laborious Impressionist strategies – a type of painless Pointillism’.

The affect of the Impressionists and their forebears does shimmer by way of these dreamy, painterly pictures. A white-shirted employee bending in a hayfield feels composed by Millet, painted by Morisot. Ladies wash garments on a sun-dappled riverbank, one cross-legged woman in crimson staring curiously on the digital camera, within the type of scene beloved of Pissarro.

Additional-long publicity occasions – 30 occasions longer than black and white – meant discomfort was an inevitable a part of the method: a lady in a wide-brimmed hat topped with an extravagantly massive and droopy crimson flower perches uneasily on the sting of a cornfield holding a bouquet of wildflowers. And there’s a reminder that the ‘tranquil magnificence’ and ease of this gilded fin-de-siècle got here at a human worth: towards the majority of a dresser stuffed with blue and white plates, a maid in a blue apron droops in sleep, feather duster falling from her hand.