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Tour de Rois à Rheims (Tower of the Kings at Rheims Cathedral)

Creator

French Photographer · 1818–1882

Henri Le Secq, a painter and antiquarian, collected Old Master prints and medieval ironwork. As the son of a politician, Le Secq became an expert on his native Paris and the self-appointed guardian of its historic architectural treasures as the city faced urbanization. Unsurprisingly, his photographs of the city's architecture are the work for which he is best known. In 1851 he became a founder of

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Date: negative 1851–1853; print 1853
Medium: Salted paper print from paper negatives
Culture: French
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Henri Le Secq's close-up view turns this church tower into a work of elaborate sculpture rather than architecture. Commissioned by the French government as part of the 1851 *Mission Héliographique* (Heliographic Mission), Le Secq photographed the Tower of Kings, the south tower of Notre-Dame Cathedral at Rheims, northeast of Paris, from high up in another tower. Details that would ordinarily be missed from the ground are here revealed with breathtaking clarity. From 1845 to 1864, the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc worked on the restoration of the Cathedral. Construction scaffolding, which almost disappears in the elaborate decoration of the exterior, is visible encasing the tower at left.

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