Senlis, France


Grounds of the château of Captain René-François Fenwick, Senlis, France, December 26, 1914, by Auguste Léon, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

The house itself had been largely destroyed in a WWI battle about four months before the photo was taken (another image here). Fenwick was a captain of the 31st Regiment of the Dragons who fell in combat in July 1918 (“an example of energy and good humor under fire”).

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 photo (A 4 757) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.

Chambord, France

Chambord, ca. 1920, Arthur Peck Collection, OSU on flickr“View of drive from roof, Chambord,” France, ca. 1920, via Arthur Peck Collection, Oregon State University (OSU) Special Collections & Archives Commons on flickr.

Arthur Peck was a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Oregon Agricultural College* from 1908 to 1948. During his long career, he created a teaching library of 24 boxes of glass lantern slides — now in OSU’s archives.

ADDENDUM: June 2017 — A 14-year-long renovation of the grounds has just been completed.


*The college later became OSU.