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 he location of a photograph showing Dagnan working in his atelier also provides clues to his working method. Tacked on the rear wall of his studio, in preparation for he completion of the final grouping of figures for Breton Women at a Pardon, are several sheets of tracing paper cut into irregular shapes. Each tracing paper fragment has been interrelated with another as Dagnan manipulated his figures in this manner to achieve his finished composition. Since the small ledge at the rear also contains a photographic print of some posed models, the photo of Dagnan at work reveals other information. Dagnan is seen in the process of squaring a photo for transfer since he is holding in his fingers a mechanical measuring device.
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For this painting, Dagnan had depended more exclusively on photographic illusion. The preliminary images can be seen as aide-memoires; the other, secondary photos of models and tracings are a painstaking elaboration upon these. The final composition, although completed in 1887, was not exhibited until the 1889 Salon.
The exhibit evoked a similar critical reaction to that of his earlier Brittany scene, with much commentary as to how Dagnan had captured the "... soul of Brittany."24 Paul Mantz was more enthusiastic, noting that Dagnan-Bouveret had emerged as the major painter at the Salon.25 The critic was enflamed by Dagnan's ability to associate contemporary reality with overtures of past ages through his selection of the Brittany pardon theme.
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He linked his canvas, through its delicacy of execution, with the masters of illuminated manuscripts of the fifteenth century.26
Once again, through the use of photography, Dagnan had created a complex image of Brittany while painting in his makeshift outdoor studio in Ormoy. By manipulating techniques he had learned from colleagues, and by mastering the intricacies of composite scenes, he had become a foremost transcriber of naturalist illusion. In effect, he worked as an early photo-realist, constantly checking his photographic aids against either the actual model (as he could be doing in his Ormoy studio) or his own personal vision of his work. The sophistication of his compositions and the ease with which he integrated photo-mechanical means with his own style were characteristic of the fully mature artist.
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If it's now apparent that Dagnan relied heavily on photography, it is less obvious why he pursued this course. Dagnan was one of several naturalist painters who reacted to the continually expanding interest in recording man in his environment in an accurate way. This intention may lie at the heart of Dagnan's methods. Since he can never be regarded as an avant-garde artist, his reliance on photographic illusion raises other crucial issues that will eventually have to be resolved. Since Dagnan succumbed to the lure of the new medium, it's quite likely that other academically trained artists followed suit. What is most compelling in Dagnan's case is that he ran the gamut of known photographic experimentation, thus revealing that it was not only
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the Impressionists who saw the benefits of the new medium but also the conservative painters who were dedicated to exhibiting at the government-sponsored Salons and later at those held by the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts (after 1890).
Thus, Dagnan's use of photography can now be viewed as a new phase in the medium's impact on artists in several camps. It removes part of the cloak of secrecy that has plagued a full understanding of the interrelationships between painting and photography in the last decades of the nineteenth century.27
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