Le marché aux fleurs, Chartres, France, August 19, 1922, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
One of my favorite blogs, It’s About Time by garden historian Barbara Wells Sarudy, is currently posting a series on paintings of flower sellers by American artists. Check it out here.
The autochrome above is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photos (A 33804 S) are © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
enclos*ure 
Can’t decide if I like this French setup or the Japanese flower sellers more. All so evocative of their eras. Love the way the flower sellers have the same setup many years apart in Japan.
I had found the Library of Congress Japanese print a few months ago. Then I was so happy to stumble over the photo last week.
This French picture has such a sense of stillness.