Franz Rontag: Art Of The Bromoil

Like the autochrome, often featured here, the bromoil was an early photographic process that became outmoded as newer, more reliable methods of taking pictures were developed. Essentially, the bromoil was an oil based print that allowed talented practitioners to make painterly photographs. A major drawback was the inability make enlargements from the original image.
Again, like the autochrome, the bromoil process attracts new photographers even today because of the beauty of the imagery the process makes possible. It was also a favorite technique of the Pictorialsts of the 1910s and 1920s.

Franz Rontag (1897-1980) was an amateur photographer from Austria. Rontag's aims were different than those of the Pictorialists; he did not manipulate images or try to create effects but only wanted to make the most faithful and pleasing color pictures he could. The images shown here were made in the 1930s and are from http://de.geocities.com/heinrich_kreissl/
Is there a nostalgic quality inherent in these pictures or does the process create the aura? We know that the middle European world depicted here was changed irrevocably by the ugliness of war, that was already inherent in events not captured in artful photographs of daily life. But looking at recent bromoils by Jill Skupin Burkholder (on The Errant Aesthete website) makes me think that the process itself is conducive to a distanced way of seeing things.