The real name of the renowned 19th-century French photographer, Charles Marville was Charles-François Bossu. The young Bossu adopted the pseudonym Marville just as he was embarking on a career as an illustrator and painter in the early 1830s, but he is most well known for his photographs of Paris in the 1860s.

In the late 1850s the city of Paris( the Commission for Monumental Historical Monuments) commissioned Marville to document the ancient quarters of the city before encroaching urban modernization changed them forever. He photographed renovations and new construction, including the new Paris Opéra.

Marville purposely took the photographs of Paris's architecture and streets scenes when it was raining, so that the soft diffused light mixed with the rain on the cobblestone produced a picturesque image that elicited a feeling of urban beauty.

His views, taken in the late 1850s, were intended to record the many buildings and neighborhoods ultimately destroyed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's urban planning project that would create the boulevards and open spaces of modern Paris. While Marville's survey of the city, extensive and thorough in scope, prefigured other important efforts of its kind, it is distinguished by its emotional accessibility. His work beautifully reveals a Paris that has long disappeared.