Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs will feature early photographs by the Welsh marine painter, Rev. Calvert Richard Jones (1804-1877) and others, at TEFAF Maastricht from 16-25 March 2012. Jones’s early salt prints and calotype negatives on view were inspired by the artist’s travels in Italy and Malta.

Among the highlights will be a dynamic photograph from 1846 of the equestrian statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill, Rome. A stunning panorama of two salt prints forms a lively harbor view of Santa Lucia, Naples, 1846. Jones’s View to the South of the Capitol, Rome, 1846, will be exhibited alongside a later study of the same subject from 1852-1855, a salt print attributed to Firmin-Eugène Le Dien and Gustave Le Gray.

Jones had studied with John Ruskin’s drawing master, James Duffield Harding. As his painting style evolved, Jones focused on British street scenes and shipping studies, which also became photographic subjects. Jones was a close friend and pupil of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography. An accomplished watercolorist, Jones brought an artistic vision to the new medium of photography. He appreciated Talbot’s new calotype process, which eschewed fine detail, expressing a painterly sense of light and shadow. The negatives from Jones’s Mediterranean tour were such a success that William Henry Fox Talbot purchased them to make prints for sale.

Images of Italy by other early photographers will also be on view at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs. The Scottish painter, Robert Macpherson is represented by a crystalline albumen print View of Rome from the French Academy, Monte Pincio, probably before 1863. Heinrich Kühn’s In Bacino di San Marco, Venezia, made before 1904 from a negative circa 1898, is an exhibition size gum bichromate print that commands attention as a hand finished masterpiece from the Photo Secession.

A rare contact print of Edgar Degas, a self-portrait from 1895 will also be exhibited. This intimate photograph shows Degas sitting in his library. The artist began experimenting with photography in the 1880s. This contact print is unique. Two enlarged prints of the image are known, one at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the other at the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This exhibition will be on view from 16-25 March 2012 at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, Stand 450, at TEFAF, The European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, The Netherlands. The telephone number at the stand is +1 917 273 4609.