Charles Aubry

Charles Hippolyte Aubry was born in Paris in 1811. For much of his career he worked as an industrial designer, producing patterns for fabric, lace, carpet, and wallpaper manufacturers. Around 1860 he began experimenting with photography, and in 1864 he opened a Paris studio and company devoted to producing plaster casts and photographs of flowers, leaves, and plants. To compensate for the insensitivity of early photographic emulsions to green tones, he often dipped his botanical specimens in plaster before photographing them, giving the resulting prints a distinctive sculptural quality. He intended the images primarily as instructional models for designers, sculptors, painters, and drawing schools, and period mounts of his work carry a "MEDAILLE D'OR A CH. AUBRY 1864" stamp; French sources also describe an album of his compositions presented to the imperial family, for which he reportedly received a medal, though the exact date of that honor is not firmly documented.

The business did not sustain itself. Aubry declared bankruptcy in 1865, closed his studio, and left Paris for a village outside the city. He returned to Paris around 1872 but photographed only intermittently thereafter. He died in Paris in March 1877, in the city's 19th arrondissement; no source consulted for this profile gives the exact day of the month.

Researchers should note that at least one other, unrelated French artist named Charles Aubry, a painter, illustrator, and military lithographer active in Saumur in the early nineteenth century, appears in some reference databases. He is a distinct figure from the botanical photographer and designer profiled here.

Aubry is discussed almost entirely in institutional and specialist-dealer terms rather than through contemporary art criticism, since his working life ended well over a century ago and predates modern art journalism about photography. Specialist photography dealers place him, alongside Adolph Braun, among the strongest floral photographers of the nineteenth century, and museums including the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art have collected and exhibited his botanical studies as evidence of photography's early role as a working tool for design education. The Art Institute of Chicago's discussion of his work stresses the gap between the sophistication of his photographic technique and the financial failure of his business, a tension that recurs across the institutional literature on him.

Aubry's auction market is thin and historical rather than active in the contemporary sense. His all-time auction high is Untitled (Study of Leaves), an albumen print that sold for USD 137,500 at Phillips in New York on 3 April 2017, against a pre-sale estimate of USD 60,000 to 80,000. Market-tracking sources report that his realized prices at auction since 2000 have ranged broadly, from a few hundred dollars to that 2017 high, reflecting the wide variation in size, condition, and subject among the leaf and flower studies that come to market.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Charles Aubry, and no gallery or estate currently represents his work; pieces reach the market through specialist photography dealers and auction houses, with attribution resting on period mounts, stamps, and provenance rather than a certification body. Recorded auction prices for his work vary enormously, from several hundred dollars to the USD 137,500 record set at Phillips in 2017, so any single sale should be read in the context of the specific print's size, subject, and condition rather than as a stable benchmark. Because more than one nineteenth-century French artist shares the name Charles Aubry, collectors and researchers should confirm that any work under consideration is attributed to Charles Hippolyte Aubry (1811 to 1877), the textile designer turned botanical photographer, and not to the unrelated Saumur-based illustrator of the same name.