Two albumen photographs: A wall with small staircase, ornately carved wooden panels with Biblical scenes. * Close-up study of a carved circular decoration on a wall. Both photographs are unmounted, each approx. 8½x7¼. Each with rubberstamp on the reverse, "E. Atget, Rue Campagne-Premiere, 17 bis." On the back of each photograph Atget has written in pencil, "Notre Dame (Stalle)" with a number, respectively 5068 and 5079. These images were likely used by Atget in a sample book, which he used to market his photographs, customers being able to order additional prints of the images. Eugène Atget is renowned as one of the greatest photographers of the turn of the twentieth century. From the late 19th Century onwards, he began to record an urban yet intimate Paris as seen through the city's streets and buildings. Conscientious, methodical, objective, Atget laid aside the expressiveness of the Romantics and was a pioneer in a new kind of modernism. Atget captures starkly lit architectural motifs and decorative details, giving them an almost abstract quality, as if they were museum pieces. When Atget records a structure or decorative element, he is entering into a one-to-one dialogue with an artisan-artist from the past concerning the forms themselves, quite independently of social considerations and hierarchies. The architectural and artistic legacy continues, a century later, to seduce and astonish the viewer.