Humbert de Molard, freed from financial concerns by the wealth of his landholdings in Normandy and perhaps missing the activity of Paris as he settled in the provincial town of Lagny, took up photography in 1843, just four years after its invention. A clever chemist and skilled craftsman, he quickly mastered the new medium of daguerreotype and experimented with paper photography by the late 1840s.

Clearly attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and its early nineteenth-century French revival, the wealthy baron and gentleman farmer Humbert de Mollard posed his caretaker Louis Dodier (standing in elegant contrapposto, wearing wooden clogs) and other workers in a tableau of rural activity at his château at Argentelle, in Normandy.