s these catalogs suggest, Adrierl's output was prolific. But in addition to this expansion of his father's business, he was also experimenting with mechanically colored prints - they were done in Zurich, by the photochromie process - and made four trips to Philadelphia to explore publication opportunities, including a proposed New Testament Illustrated with Photographs, and a book on the journeys of St. Paul. Meanwhile, the Bonfils family had added a third photographer to its roster: Lydie Bonfils, a fact that emerged when the HSM staff found a reference by an English clergyman named Manning, in his 1874 volume, Palestine lllustrated by Pen and Pencil, to photographers whose prints he used in preparing his own sketches. Among them was "Madame Bonfils of Beyrout". Lydie, it seems, had decided that mixing albumen for her husband and son was not enough, and apparently got involved in portraits and costume studies in the Beirut studios; descendants, in fact, have confirmed that she worked in the family's Beirut studio for some time after her son abandoned the trade in the early 1900s. There is evidence too that she ranged more widely. In Brummana, a member of the Maksad family told of "Lady Bonfils" stopping a Druze shaikh to pose for her one morning, just after the outbreak of the First World War. And her own photo, according to Nitza Rosovsky, an historian of old Jerusalem, appears in one of the prints in the Harvard cache; she is standing on the pyramid at Giza. Thus Lydie, despite a growing distaste for eggs, apparently continued the business after Adrien had begun to turn his attention to a proposed medical spa in the mountains of Lebanon - even issuing her own catalog until the First World War forced her removal from Beirut and brought an end to the prolific photographic output of this remarkable family. By then, however, the work of the Bonfils family was not only extensive, but of an unparalleled quality. Tt is, in fact, an incomparable legacy to both history and art - for reasons that Dr. Gavin explains in detail in The Images of the East [prev] [next]

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