The Family Photographer

Photograph by René Breguet

Last month, I featured a Halloween photograph by my maternal grandfather, René Breguet, and mentioned that he had thoroughly documented my childhood. And because a number of blogging friends have encouraged me to do so, today I'm sharing a few more of his photographs.

Above is a self-portrait of the photographer, using a timer on his Zeiss Ikon camera. Though the license plate has the number "37," I believe this car is a 1935 Cadillac V8.

Photograph by René Breguet

Here's an image of my maternal grandmother in the same car. She has just lowered a newspaper, the tip of which can be seen at the lower right. She was a constant knitter, and doubtlessly made the jacket she's wearing.

Photograph by René Breguet

Here's a photo of the photographer's father-in-law, my great-grandfather Cesar. He's standing in his vineyard in Ligerz, Switzerland, and behind him is a great lake called Bielersee. The landmass in the distant right is the island of Sankt-Petersinsel, which was a favorite spot of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Photograph by René Breguet

Of all my childhood photographs, this is my favorite. My grandfather loved taking photographs of me and the circumstance of this particular one is that I had finally tired of the grandfatherly paparazzi.

Photograph by René Breguet

Having said that, I want to add that I idolized my grandfather, and so this photograph has great meaning for me. At some point I was given a miniature toy camera, one that had no moving parts whatsoever, but which looked authentic. It delighted my grandfather that whenever he took a photograph, I would immediately move into his space to take an identical shot. Here you can see his shadow, including the Homburg hat that he always wore.

Photograph by René Breguet

I spent innumerable hours with my grandfather in museums and galleries. Here I am at the National Gallery of Art, Saturday, March 27, 1954. I never tired of my grandfather's company because he was that unusual adult who never talked down to children. In retrospect, I'm sure that on this particular Saturday he explained the meaning behind any of the paintings that interested me.

Photograph by René Breguet

My grandfather enjoyed photographing art at the National Gallery and kept several photographic albums of paintings and sculptures for his own reference. This is my favorite of that series.

Photograph by René Breguet

Here I am studying a beautifully illustrated Bible. I still remember that afternoon.

Photograph by René Breguet

This is my favorite photograph of my brothers, taken in 1950. My understanding of my grandfather's work has evolved through the years. Because I grew up with his photographs, I knew them first as familiar images and accepted them simply as that. With time, I regarded them as good portraits, and more recently I've realized that they're fine psychological studies.

My grandfather was a psychiatrist, and a great observer of human nature. He was an engaging conversationalist with children and adults alike, and because his camera was also ever-present, his portraits — like the one above — have a very candid aspect. Certainly the words, "Say cheese!" never crossed his lips.

Photographs by René Breguet

These are Neoclassic toy chests that my father painted around the time that he was stationed in Occupation Germany. During World War II, munitions were sent to the front in such wooden crates, and after the war there was a surplus of these. While many were doubtlessly broken down for firewood during an historically cold winter, others were put to more creative use.

Photograph by René Breguet

This is my father and me on Mother's Day, 1957. My father was about to leave on a business trip. I like this photograph for three reasons. First, I like that it's an image Norman Rockwell could easily have painted; though it's not posed, it's how Rockwell would have posed his subjects. Second, the photo perfectly captures my father as I remember him. And finally, I love that the background looks like a painted studio backdrop, but it is in fact one of the streets of my childhood.

Photograph by René Breguet

Oh, my gosh, I loved this car! It was red and to my mind, very classy. I think my grandfather knew my pride in it. I don't know where I'd put it, but I wish I still had it.

Photograph by René Breguet

This is a photograph of my mother in 1958. She's wearing my grandfather's watch chain as a necklace, and from it hangs a Serbian Red Cross medal my grandfather was awarded during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913.

Photograph by René Breguet

When my grandfather wasn't photographing our family, he photographed many evocative images that he entered into photographic shows around the country. He called this Fantasie.
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Micromosaics

Mark D. Ruffner © 2013

My great-grandmother, Emma Breguet, died at a young age, and little of what belonged to her is left. What remains reveals that she gravitated to all things inlaid, including micromosaics. Today I thought I'd share one of her paperweights, apparently a souvenir of Rome.

click to enlarge

Below are the individual sights, and you can click on each of them to enlarge the images. (Because the black marble base has many hairline scratches, I've obscured them so that you might focus more easily on these little masterpieces.)

click to enlarge  |  Temple of Hercules Victor

click to enlarge  |  The Colosseum

click to enlarge  |  Forum Romanum

click to enlarge  |  The Pantheon

click to enlarge  |  Vatican Square

For larger mosaics, glass chips called smalti, below, are used (smalto, singular). For micromosaics, smalti is heated and drawn out into long threads called filati, which in that drawing out become very thin. It is this filati that is used in micromosaics, and it is indeed thin; you can see where filati is missing in areas of the Pantheon, above, and that slight deterioration is essentially a flaking.

mosaicartsupply.com

Above is smalti, huge in comparison to the filati that would be used in micromosaics.

Because the filati pieces are so tiny, beautiful gradations can be accomplished. Look, for example, at how the skies in all the images above gradate to the horizon, and then see what a stunning effect that creates in the first image of the entire plaque.

click to enlarge  |  http://www.lacma.org/search/node/micromosaics 

Above is one of the most spectacular of micromosaics, an image of the Colosseum measuring 18¾ x 25⅞. It's on extended loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Gilbert Collection. This micromosaic was made circa 1850.
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My Tenuous Connection to Marie Antoinette

This lovely painting of a young Marie Antoinette comes from the blog of Catherine Delors, who writes extensively on the life and times of the tragic queen. For more information about the painting, and to explore Catherine's fine blog, click here.

We're still intrigued, sometimes morbidly so, by Marie Antoinette's spiraling life, by the tumultuous time in which she lived, and even by those who crossed her path in good times or bad.

One such person was an ancestor of mine, Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823), considered by many to be the greatest watchmaker of all time.

Abraham-Louis Breguet

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were enthusiasts of Breguet (pronounced Bray-gay) because in their time, he revolutionized everything that had to do with watches and timekeeping. Breguet's inventions made watches shock-proof, balanced and self-winding (perpétuelles). Breguet developed the tourbillon, which allowed watches to counter the effects of gravity. He invented gongs for repeating watches, the Breguet key (which could only be turned in one direction), and the very first wristwatch (designed for Queen Caroline Murat of Naples).

Other patrons included George Washington, Talleyrand, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, King George III, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dumas, Queen Victoria and Sir Winston Churchill. At the Battle of Waterloo, both Napoleon and Wellington were wearing Breguet watches.

Sotheby Parke Bernet

Besides taking the mechanics of watchmaking to new heights, Abraham-Louis Breguet was responsible for a new aesthetics — the high-tech look of his time — and a look which is still very contemporary. Breguet's attention to detail included guilloche faces and his distinctive watch hand design, a trademark of the company to this day. The above image is a carriage clock sold in 1826. It's an eight-day clock and calendar that repeats on the quarter hour.

observer.com

Breguet's most famous watch was one he created for Marie Antoinette, and today it's known simply as "The Marie Antoinette." This handsome piece was designed to include every conceivable watch function known at the time, and was not completed until years after the queen's death. Today it is valued at $30 million.

Breguet made numerous marine chronometers, and in 1815 was named official chronometer maker to the French navy. He was admitted to the Academy of Sciences in 1816, was awarded the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by Louis XVIII in 1819, and in 1888, 65 years after his death, Breguet's name was one of 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

I'll end this posting with a little family story. My grandfather Breguet was a psychiatrist, and when I was about five, he gave me a cheap alarm clock to play with. "Go ahead and do anything you want with it," he said. "You can even open it up and take it apart." Many years later I remembered getting the clock, and I realized that he was of course trying to determine whether an aptitude for horology could be genetic. I told the story to my mother, and she said, "Oh, yes, he gave me a clock when I was that age, too."

We must have disappointed him sorely because we both dutifully took apart our clocks, and then seeing piles of loose parts, moved on to more gratifying entertainment!

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