Versailles, France. Artist: Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris). Dimensions: 17.8 x 21.9 cm (7 x 8 5/8 in.). Date: 1923.Although he studied drama in Paris in the mid-1870s and was an itinerant actor for some years thereafter, Eugène Atget's theatrical sensibility found its best outlet in a more deliberate, contemplative, and purely visual art form. In 1898 he began to photograph old Paris, and within a decade he had made a name as an assiduous documenter of the art and architecture of the ancien régime. Except for a brief attempt to capture life in the streets early in his career, Atget rarely photographed people, preferring the streets themselves as well as the gardens, courtyards, and other areas that constituted the cultural stage. <p>After the Great War, Atget frequently focused on mannequins, statues, and other "substitute" actors. At Versailles, where he had worked since 1901, he came to see the sculptures not as felicitous ornaments but as characters in an immemor