Charles Nègre  Hans P. Kraus Jr.  962 Park Ave.   Through Nov. 1
Charles Nègre's 'Fréjus,' (1852) at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Hans P.
Kraus Jr., Inc. New York  Painting has been photography's older
sibling from the start. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851)
was an established painter before he perfected the technology
that became the daguerreotype. Charles Nègre (1820-1880) also
came to photography from painting, as did many of his
contemporaries. Five years after Daguerre announced his
invention to great public acclaim, Nègre was taking photographs
as an aid to his painting, although he used the negative process
invented by the Englishman William Fox Talbot (1880-1877). Nègre
continued with his successful painting career but, from first
conceiving of his photographs solely as aids for himself, he
next commercialized his pictures of public buildings, ruins,
landscapes, seascapes and still-lifes by making them available
to other painters, and then came to think of them as works of
art in themselves to be sold t