In 1913, two Frenchwomen, named Madeleine Mignon and Marguerite Mespoulet, took a 2-month-long trip to Ireland.
The two women were a part of a world-wide project called Archives of the Planet (Archives de la Planète). It was initiated by Alberth Kahn, French banker and philanthropist, and it aimed to create “a kind of photographic inventory of the surface of the earth, as it was occupied and organized by men at the beginning of the 20th century.” So, the project was kind of like a primitive Google Maps.
The photographs captured by Madeleine Mignon and Marguerite Mespoulet are the earliest color photos of Ireland. Through the lenses of their Autochrome Lumière cameras, these adventurer intellectuals documented priceless moments of remote villages, Irish rural settlements, lives of locals adhering to traditional Gaelic values, ancient Celtic monuments, prominent Christian sites, green landscapes, cemeteries, street settings from Galway city and much more.
Without further ado, let’s commence our photographic trip back in time to the 1900’s Ireland.
Disclaimer: The photos belong to the archives of “Autochrome de Marguerite Mespoulet (inv.A 3 706). © Musée Albert-Khan – Département des Hauts-de-Seine”
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The boy is dressed in a skirt which is common in the region for all boys up to the age of 12.

A coracle is a small boat, traditionally used in Ireland (particularly on the River Boyne), Wales and Scotland.
The word “coracle” comes from the Welsh “cwrwgl”, cognate with the Irish “currach”,



Claddagh (Irish: an Cladach, meaning “the shore”) was a fishing village close to the centre of Galway city.
The people of Claddagh lived away from the City of Galway and retained their Gaelic customs, language
and dress well into the 1930s. The original village of thatched cottages was razed in 1935 and replaced
by a council-housing scheme.

These dwellings are typical of Irish peasantry in the 18th and 19th centuries. The neatly thatched roofs and whitewashed walls
show skilled craftsmanship, but cannot hide the true desperation and poverty of the native Irish

A wheelwright is a person who builds or repairs wheels. This man has painted his doors with the same paint as his wheels!





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There was a practise of tinting photos in the early 1900s. Tinting photographs was a special skill. It was not colour photography as such. There are family photographs up to the 1940s where you can see they have been coloured later. I do not know when coloured photography was introduced, but the film Gone with the Wind was photographed in colour in the 1930s.
Greeting…
Good work
Thank you!
Hello Rosaleen,
This color process was the first of its kind (patented in 1903) and not just tinting of black and white photos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumière
I hope this makes these photos more interesting to you.