What was the first name of the person who died in Paris between 1883 and 1898?
In 1861, Rossier was in Siam, where he assisted the French zoologist Firmin Bocourt by taking ethnographic portraits for the latter's scientific expedition of 1861–1862, and in 1863, Negretti and Zambra issued a series of 30 stereographic portraits and landscapes taken in Siam that are almost certainly the work of Rossier. In February 1862, Rossier was again in Shanghai, where he sold his cameras and other photographic equipment before embarking for Europe. During his time in Asia it is possible that Rossier photographed in India; Negretti and Zambra issued a series of views of India at about the same time as Rossier's China views.Rossier returned to Switzerland in early 1862 and, in October 1865, married Catharine Barbe Kaelin (1843–1867). The couple had a son, Christophe Marie Pierre Joseph, who was born on 30 July 1866. Catharine died on 4 April 1867.
Rossier maintained a photographic studio in Fribourg until at least 1876 and he also had a studio in Einsiedeln. During the 1860s and 1870s, he produced a number of stereographs and cartes-de-visite comprising portraits and views of Fribourg, Einsiedeln and other places in Switzerland. An 1871 advertisement in the French-language Fribourg newspaper La Liberté offered photographs by Rossier of religious paintings by the artist Melchior Paul von Deschwanden. In 1872, Rossier applied for a passport to travel to France where he may have produced photographs. At some point between 1871 and 1884, he married again. His second wife, Marie Virginie Overney, was employed as a household servant by the landlords of his studio. They had a son, Joseph Louis, who was born in Paris on 16 March 1884, and who went on to own a café in Vevey, Switzerland. He died in 1927.
Pierre Rossier died in Paris some time between 1883 and 1898.Examples of Rossier's views of Switzerland are held in several institutions and private collections in that country. Rossier took the first commercial photographs of China and Japan, and they are now quite rare. He complained at times of the adverse effects of the climate on his photographic chemicals and some of his negatives may have been damaged en route to London from Asia. Though his surviving images are scarce, his importance to the early history of photography in Asia is great. Before his arrival in Japan in 1859, Japanese students of photography had struggled to produce satisfactory images, but Rossier's experience, instruction, and contacts with suppliers of photographic materials were extremely helpful in the development of an autonomous photographic tradition in Japan.
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