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Lumiere Bros:Autochrome Colour Photography 1903.
Isn’t this wonderful? In a period when Impressionism was just becoming universally known, and the breakthrough artists of the previous 30 years or so at last being critically recognised (Manet, Monet, Degas, Pissaro, and other Impressionists), then the Lumiere brothers invent Autochrome – a photo- graphic technique derived from the same inspirational theory that drove Seurat and Signac’s Poin- tillism (and in principle, underpinned the entire Impressionist movement) – Maxwell’s Theory of tri- chromatic colour vision (1861) – and Autochrome effectively makes possible the creation of Impres- sionist colour photographs – and they are beautiful. This is the first commercially successful col- our-imaging technology, and it dominated this marketplace until Kodak, Agfa and others developed modern colour film technologies in the 1930s (Kodachrome 1935).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Autochrome_Lumi%C3%A8re#:~:text=The%20Autochrome%20Lumi%C3%A8re%20was%20an,film%20in%20the%20mid%2D1930s.
Never was there a more perfect harmony between fine art and mass-media than the synchronicity of Autochrome and post-Impressionism. The soft painterliness of the Autochrome process was wel- comed with open arms by the pictorialist photographers - especially perhaps Arnold Genthe and Edward Steichen. The photo-archivist Albert Kahn (Archive of the Planet, 1908 - 1931) collected over 72,000 Autochromes from all over the world in his vast collection.
The Lumiere Brothers patented the Autochrome process - the first successful popular colour-film process - in 1903. It was a complex process, based on the use of microscopic grains of clear potato starch that had been dyed: 40% dyed green, 35% dyed blue/violet, and 25% dyed orange-red, effect- ively giving a randomised mix of tiny red/green/blue filters that were spread onto a prepared photo- sensitive glass plate. Lamp black was then used to cover the remaining clear areas of the plate, which was then varnished to seal it. Autochromes were similar in pictorial effect to the late 19th cen- tury pointillist paintings of George Seurat and Paul Signac. They also alluded to the painterly tech- nique of August Renoir:
