1. VITTORIO SELLA. Pyramide Durand. From the summit of Mont Pelvoux (Pointe Puiseux), at 12,900 feet. Gift of Anna Chase, c. 1879-1892, Sella number AI 524(2). 11.1x15" collodion print, printed c. 1893, flush mounted on thin board, mounted on 13x16.5" heavy gray board. Inscribed in ink on mount recto: Alps / Pyramide Durand etc. From the summit of Mont Pelvoux (Pointe Puiseux) at 12900 feet. / I 524. Print embossed with Vittorio Sella stamp; inscribed in ink: 524; inscribed in pencil on mount verso: 524.

2. VITTORIO SELLA. Pointe Puiseux, from the summit of Pyramide Durand, c. 1879-1892, Sella number AI 527. 11.3x15.3" collodion print, printed c. 1893, flush mounted on thin board, mounted on 13x16.5" heavy gray board. Inscribed in ink on mount recto: Alps / Pointe Puiseaux, from summit of Pyramide Durand / I 527; Print recto embossed with artist's credit stamp in bottom right corner; inscribed in ink: 529; inscribed in pencil: AI.

According to Charles Fay, writing in the 1893 AMC Bulletin, Vittorio Sella was born in the Piedmont Region of Biella, northern Italy in 1859, in sight of the outliers of the Alps. His father, Venanzio Guiseppe Sella, was a woolen manufacturer who ran textile mills called Lanificio Maurzio Sella, which had been in the family for hundreds of years. The son seems to have inherited his father's versatility, for Venanzio Sella not only authored a standard work on woolen manufacture, but also published a treatise in 1856 on the then-new art of photography, which was translated into German and French and incorporated in Roret's Encyclopedic.

Sella's uncle, Quintino Sella, was a famous Italian minister of finance and founder of the Italian Alpine Club. It was he who taught the boy to love the mountains by taking the fifteen-year-old Sella on his first ascent in 1874, followed by another a year later.

In 1877 Sella left school to serve in the Italian army, and then returned to Biella to carry on the family business since his father had died in 1876. Every holiday, summer and winter, Sella was in the nearby mountains, often carrying an old photographic apparatus that had belonged to his father. By 1879, the twenty-year-old Sella had become an accomplished photographer who had mastered the collodion wet plate process and learned to develop mammoth glass plates on site, even in harsh weather conditions. He also began working with dry plates around this time.

1. Good: Moderate wear, abrasions and dirt, fingerprint on upper L quadrant. Mount has corner and edge wear and is dirty.

2. Good: Moderate wear, dirt corner and edge wear and abrasions; series of short scratches on upper middle section of print. Mount is worn and dirty.