Collection Online as of May 24, 2022
The Sphinx
John Beasley Greene
(American, 1832-1856)
Salted paper print from waxed paper negative
Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund 2009.277
Location
not on view
Description
The son of a wealthy banker, Greene was an American but born and raised in Paris. At a young age, he became an avid archaeologist focusing on the Middle East. Before embarking on his first trip to Egypt in 1853 at age 19, he learned photography so he could accurately document excavations, discoveries, and inscriptions, but he also used the relatively new medium to produce elegant landscapes such as the view of Thebes nearby. Greene, who was involved in excavations of the Great Sphinx, died in Cairo in 1856, possibly of tuberculosis.
John Beasley Greene
John Beasley Greene American, b. France, 1832-1856
John Beasley Greene was born in France to American parents; his father, John Bulkley Greene, was a Boston banker working in Le Havre and then Paris. The younger Greene was a founding member of the Société française de photographie and joined the Société asiatique. He combined an early interest in archaeology and photography, working in Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa in the brief period from 1853 until his premature death in 1856. During this time, Greene produced a body of work using the waxed paper process, outstanding in its aesthetic and technical merits and unusual in its clearly personal approach. Frequently spare and almost minimalist to a modern eye, his work emphasizes abstract form, tempered by the visual textures of his negatives and paper.
In 1854 Blanquart-Évrard published some 94 of Greene's prints in Le Nil. Monuments et paysages. Explorations photographiques. Although similar in subject to that of Maxime Du Camp and Félix Teynard, Greene's work remains unique—depicting poetic landscapes of the Nile and the distant desert inhabited by ancient monuments. T.W.F.