![\"A](\"http:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/art366\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/54\/2023\/05\/Cameron_julia_jackson-e1697566227257-300x266.jpg\")
Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Julia Stephen born Julia Jackson, mother of Virginia Woolf, <\/cite> April 1867. Albumen silver print from wet collodion negative. 27.6 x 22.0 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Harriott A. Fox Endowment, 1968.227. CONTENTS<\/p>\r\n
Introduction<\/p>\r\n
5.1<\/p>\r\n
The Invention of Photography<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.2<\/p>\r\n Early Photographic Portraiture<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.3<\/p>\r\n Portrait Photography, Art, and Aesthetics<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.4<\/p>\r\n F\u00e9lix Nadar: Beyond the Documentary Portrait<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.5<\/p>\r\n Julia Margaret Cameron: Art Photography and Pictorialism<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.6<\/p>\r\n Modern Impressionist Portrait Paintings and the Impact of Photographic Techniques<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.7<\/p>\r\n Edgar Degas and the Influence of Photography<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.8<\/p>\r\n Impressionist Portraits of Colleagues and Friends<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.9<\/p>\r\n Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bazille<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.10<\/p>\r\n Auguste-Pierre<\/a>\u00a0Renoir and the Group Portrait<\/a><\/p>\r\n 5.11<\/p>\r\n Renoir's Images of Children<\/a><\/p>\r\n INTRODUCTION<\/p>\r\n The invention of photography significantly impacted avant-garde painters who were interested in representing contemporary life. The immediacy and objectivity of the medium attracted Impressionists whose interest was in capturing the ever-changing, everyday experiences of the modern world. The advent of photography radically altered how visual art was both conceived and perceived.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1467\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"] In 1837, Louis Daguerre, a painter, printmaker and proprietor of the Parisian Diorama, invented the daguerreotype camera. It was the first commercially available method of mechanical image reproduction. Each daguerreotype was a finely detailed and permanent unique image recorded on a silvered copper plate. The process involved treating the silver-plated sheets with iodine to make them light sensitive, then developing them in a camera with mercury vapour.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5306\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"] From its early beginnings, photography presented as a double-edged medium, both a scientific device and a means of aesthetic expression. The first generation of portrait photographers struggled with this duality even as they experimented with new techniques, debating whether photography should appropriate the aesthetic concerns and characteristics of portrait painting, the expressive significance of poses and background props, and issues of composition, lighting and how to render tone and texture monochromatically.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5311\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"] Gustave Le Gray was a central figure in French photography of the 1850s. Malcolm Daniel elaborates on the artist's contributions to the field of photography in \u201cGustave Le Gray (1820\u20131884).\u201d (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000\u2013. http:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/toah\/hd\/gray\/hd_gray.htm (October 2004)<\/p>\r\n\r\n Before taking up photography in 1854, Nadar worked as a novelist, journalist, editor, and caricaturist for the Parisian press. The year he took up photography, he self-published\u00a0his first lithograph entitled the Panth\u00e9on Nadar, <\/em>a set of two large lithographs that comprised caricatures of prominent Parisians. He first created photographic portraits of the persons he went on to caricature.<\/p>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5347\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"] The British artist Julia Margaret Cameron was among the early photographers who did take the medium into what Daniel describes as \"new arenas of technique, subject, and expression.\"Perhaps one of the most painterly portraitist photographers of the nineteenth century, Cameron's pursuit of the artistic potential of photography challenged the medium's status as the most accurate replicator of reality. This dimension of photographic portraiture most closely reflected the concerns of a younger generation of artists more interested in evoking truthful images through atmosphere and ambiguity. In her cultivation of ambiguity and manipulation of the photographic process, she was an important pioneer of Pictorialism and the idea of photography as a contemporary art form.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5434\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"] The prevalence of portrait photography during the latter 19th century influenced the practice and formal qualities of painted portraiture. Photography was now considered the gold standard in optical realism, which freed painters from the burden of realistic replication and inspired new compositional strategies and experimental pictorial techniques. In addition, the use of photographs as references was a labour-saving practice. It reduced the time and tedium of constant studio sittings and provided visual information no longer available to the artist after a studio visit.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5442\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"] Impressionist artists painted portraits at a time when traditional portraiture, initially exclusive to the wealthy and powerful, had expanded to include the bourgeoisie. The democratization of the portrait, and the ensuing barrage of photographic images, spurred painters to innovate and reinvest portraiture with new value.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5448\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/2\/23\/Cameron_julia_jackson.jpg\")
Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde,<\/cite> 1875. Oil on canvas. 78.4 x 46.2 cm. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFreed from the burden of mimetic representation, artists shifted their attention to the portrayal of the fleeting and fragmentary events of life. Painters slowly began to appropriate the techno-formal aspects of the still photograph\u2014the shaping power of light, the use of altered perspective, an interest in cropped spaces, and the exploration of increased spatial ambiguities that echoed the moving continuum of lived experience\u2014to paint their images of a world in flux. Initially, paintings that strayed too far from objective representation were deemed unfinished, but in time their arbitrariness became accepted as an aspect of modern art.\r\n\r\nThe relationship between photography and painting was reciprocal. The photographic portrait did not remain static but evolved as well, moving from a mechanistic recording of likeness with the one-of-a-kind invention of the daguerreotype to the popular multiples of the carte-de-visite to more sophisticated and nuanced studio photography and finally to pictorialism, which engaged with broader art forms as art photography and secured its legitimate place as fine art.\r\n\r\nThis chapter will consider Impressionist portraiture within its historical context and its relationship to the parallel evolution of photographic images. The work of artists associated with the French avant-garde, such as Degas, Bazille, and Renoir, will be considered in terms of the innovations they implemented within the context of the portrait genre and how their ambitions for painting people in a modern world advanced the conceptualization and creation of late nineteenth-century portraiture.\r\n5.1\r\n| The Invention of Photography<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Jean-Baptiste Sabatier Blot,Portrait of Louis Daguerre,<\/cite> 1844. Daguerrotype. 9.1 x 6.9 cm. George Eastman Museum, Rochester. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe invention of photography in the early nineteenth century revolutionized the nature and possibilities of visual representation.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5307\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Louis Daguerre, Historique et description des proc\u00e9d\u00e9s de daguerr\u00e9otype et du diorama<\/cite> (Paris: Alphonse Giroux et cie., 1839). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5308\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Le Daguerr\u00e9otype,<\/cite> The Daguerre-Giroux camera. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5309\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"500\"]<\/a> Portrait of a Daguerreotypist Displaying Daguerreotypes and Cases,<\/cite> 1845. Hand-coloured Daguerreotype. Getty Center, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDaguerre introduced his product to the French Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences in January 1839, and to the public in late summer of that year. He followed up by patenting his product, demonstrating the process at the Conservatoire des Arts et M\u00e9tiers, and publishing an informational handbook. He also actively promoted his invention in Berlin, New York, and London.\r\n\r\nDaguerreotypes initially required long exposure lengths due to the low light sensitivity of the plates. By 1841, better plates combined with Joseph Petzval's development of a new lens in Vienna (the Petzel lens) shortened exposure times sufficiently to open the door to large-scale portrait photography.\r\n\r\nBefore the invention of photography, a painted portrait was an unaffordable luxury for the average person. Even in its infancy as a relatively precious commodity, the daguerreotype made a photo portrait accessible and highly desirable. As the technology improved, so did the cost, boosting popularity and demand. \u00a0In 1849 alone, approximately 100,000 photographic portrait pictures were recorded in Paris, adversely affecting miniature portraitists and negatively impacting larger portrait commissions.\r\n\r\nDaguerreotypes were positive, inverted images that could not be produced as multiples. Images could, however, be reproduced through \"redaguerreotyping\" the original plate. As a technique, it required a subject to sit still for a light-dependent period of time, anywhere from three to thirty minutes.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5310\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Staff at William Henry Fox Talbot's commercial calotype establishment in Reading, Berkshire, 1846. Metropolitan Museum of Art. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe innovations made by Fox Talbot, who invented the negative-positive photographic process, and the physicist Louis Fizeau, who developed Gilding, a gold-toned image, made it possible to produce photographs more resistant to deterioration and cheaper to make.\r\n5.2\r\n| Early Photographic Portraiture<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Prince Lobkowitz,<\/cite> 1858. Albumen silver print from glass negative. 20 x 23.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5312\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Demi-Monde II 57,<\/cite> from an album of photographs, ca. 1858-68. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nMalcolm Daniel provides an overview of photographers' challenges in \u201cThe Industrialization of French Photography after 1860\u201d (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2004.\u00a0 (http:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/toah\/hd\/infp\/hd_infp.htm)\r\nThe decade of the 1850s was a \u201cgolden age\u201d in the art of photography. Artists of great vision and skill took up a fully mature medium, tackled ambitious subjects, and lavished care in producing large, richly toned, and colorful prints for a select group of fellow artists or wealthy patrons. By the 1860s, times were changing, and the medium became increasingly industrialized. Instead of mixing chemicals according to personal recipes and hand coating their papers, photographers could buy commercially prepared albumen papers and other supplies. Increasingly, the marketplace pressured photographers to produce a greater quantity of cheaper prints for a less discerning audience. In marketing to a middle class, aesthetic factors such as careful composition, optimal lighting conditions, and exquisite printing became less important than the recognizable rendering of a familiar sight or famous person.<\/blockquote>\r\nWith the industrialization of the photographic medium in the 1860s, pressure turned to production. In 1854, A.A-E. Disd\u00e9ri had discovered how to produce multiple exposures on a single glass-plate negative which he printed and divided into separate pictures measuring nine-by-six centimetres. The negative could be printed a dozen times cheaply, and just like that, the carte-de-visite (<\/em>calling card) <\/em>was born.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5313\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Scovill Manufacturing Co.,Wet-plate camera with nine Darlot no. 2 lenses, <\/cite> ca. 1860. Possibly designed by Samuel Peck. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCartes-de-visite (abbreviated CdV) were postcard-size portraits made by a new multiple-lens camera with consecutively releasable shutters. The camera furnished six or eight exposures on a single plate. These multiple images became extremely popular; they were pasted on mounts and distributed to friends and business associates as visiting cards. The CdV craze necessitated hiring teams of new employees (1855 records indicate Disd\u00e9ri\u2019s business hired as many as 77 assistants), and sales volumes soared.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5314\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Charles Wilson Peale, Mrs. Charles Willson Peale (Rachel Brewer) and Baby Eleanor, <\/cite>1790. Watercolour on ivory. 6.5 x 5.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5315\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Helmut Gernsheim, and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: From the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century Up to 1914<\/cite> (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEarly photography precipitated the downfall of miniature painting and presented portrait painters with serious competition. \u201cIn the summer of 1861,\u201d according to Helmut and Alison Gernsheim in The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914<\/em> (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), \u201c33,000 people made their living from the production of photographs and photographic materials in Paris alone.\u201d\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5316\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Emperor Napol\u00e9on III and his family,<\/cite> ca. 1858. Albumen silver print. 10.1 x 5.7 cm. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAs Max Kozloff describes in \u201cNadar and the Republic of the Mind\u201d (Artforum <\/em>15 no. 1\u00a0 (September 1976): 28-39), Disd\u00e9ri was appointed the first official court photographer:\r\nThe royals had found a novel way of coining their images and of putting to use a new technology whose economic success originated in the cachet of their patronage... At the same time, it became clear that an intimate form of social exchange and personal talisman had had a public impetus and played a propaganda role. Ruling families could mime the domestic virtues in cheap, easily distributed images. Bourgeois could have themselves portrayed by means of an aristocratic emblem.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5317\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A. A. E. Disd\u00e9ri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph <\/cite> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCdV's were available to everyone, from the wealthy elite to the filles de joie<\/em> of the Second Empire's demimonde. They anticipated the democratization of photography with the medium's second wave of technological innovation with the American George Eastman's Kodak camera in the 1880s.\r\n\r\nElizabeth Anne McCauley, in A. A. E. Disd\u00e9ri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph <\/em>(Yale University Press, 1985), in her analysis of several technical manuals published by Disd\u00e9ri, describes the criteria he recommended for creating an aesthetic portrait. He advised putting subjects at ease and paying attention to the personality behind the features. \u201cOne must be able to deduce who the subject is,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto deduce spontaneously his character, his intimate life, his habits; the photographer must do more than photographe, <\/em>he must biographe.<\/em>\u201c\r\n\r\nIn discussing the origins of the CdV\u2019s mass appeal, McCauley suggests that it occurred after the aristocracy's first portraits were made, catching on with the general public, who then imitated upper-class dress and demeanour.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5318\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Dolligen, and Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Galerie des contemporains, vol. 1 <\/cite> (Paris, 1862). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5319\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Mayer & Pierson, [Carte-de-Visite Album of Prominent Personages], ca. 1860-70. Albumen silver prints. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nAs the infatuation with photographs increased, elegant albums were introduced as picture-keepers. This was a fashion that McCauley calls the \u201celevation of the photographic album to the status of an icon.\u201d\r\nMcCauley emphasizes the correlation between the carte-de-visite and the period\u2019s \u201cinsidious transformation of the individual into a malleable commodity.\u201d The demand for calling cards was an \u201cearly step toward the simplification of complex personalities into immediately graspable and choreographed performers whose faces rather than actions win elections and whose makeup rather than morals gains public approbation.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe consensus outside the ranks of professional photographers was that photography was not a bonafide<\/em> art form. In his \"The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography,\"<\/em> Charles Baudelaire decried the rise of the photographic industry and its assumed similarity to art:\r\nDuring this lamentable period a new industry arose which contributed not a little to confirm stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the French mind....The idolatrous mob demanded an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature- that is perfecting understood....Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art. A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of the multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: Since Photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then Photography and Art are the same thing.<\/blockquote>\r\nDespite widespread criticism, photographers increasingly asserted their claim to artistic status, not least of which as a bid to increase their social standing.\r\n\r\nThe overwhelming popularity and restrictions of early portrait images led to standardized studio poses and the inclusion of steadying, sometimes overly theatrical, props.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5320\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Honor\u00e9 Daumier, \u201cCroquis Parisiens: \u2018Pose de l\u2019homme de la nature\u2019, \u2018Pose de l\u2019homme civilis\u00e9\u2019,\u201d Le Charivari, <\/cite>March 31, 1853. Lithograph. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDaumier\u2019s Croquis Parisiens<\/em> mocked the most typical poses of sitters: the basic frontal rigid orientation of figures looking directly at the camera as if hypnotized, and the artistic photographs characterized by mannered posturing. Daumier labelled them the \u201cpose of the natural man\u201d and the \u201cpose of the civilized man.\u201d\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5321\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Fiocre Nemea, <\/cite>ca. 1862-65. Albumen silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5322\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Soeurs Marchisio, <\/cite> 1862. Albumen silver print. 8.4 x 5.2 cm. From Dollingen, and Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Galerie des contemporains, vol. 2 (Paris, 1862). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDisd\u00e9ri\u2019s background in theatrical acting allowed him to pose his subjects more convincingly. His portrait photographs of actors and dancers considerably increased his reputation as an artist.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5323\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, L\u2019art de la photographie<\/cite> (Paris: Chez l\u2019auteur, 1862). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDisd\u00e9ri\u2019s treatise L\u2019Art de la photographie<\/em>, published in 1862, offered a wealth of advice on posing the subject. Rather than introducing new declarations about the medium, Disd\u00e9ri wanted to show that photographic portraiture, like the well-accepted academic portraits shown at the Salon, strove for compositional integrity.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5324\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Andr\u00e9-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Self-portrait,<\/cite> ca. 1860-65. Albumen silver print mounted on cardboard. 9,5 x 6 cm. Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5325\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Andre\u0301-Adolphe-Euge\u0300ne Disde\u0301ri, L'art de la photographie, <\/cite> Paris : Chez l'auteur, 8, Boulevard des Italiens, et chez les principaux libraires de France et de l'e\u0301tranger, 1862. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDisd\u00e9ri insisted that his carte-de-visite photographs respect the formal specifications of the portrait genre, particularly the portrait artist\u2019s ability to capture \u201ca single dominant interest\u201d and the well-defined character or expression of the sitter.\u00a0 He recognized that\r\na portrait ought to convey a sense of duration rather than the impression of a fragmented moment\u2026It is appropriate to remember that one is trying to reproduce not a scene, but a portrait, and one must not abandon the search for intimate and profound resemblance in order to chase after some aspect that might present itself but that is not a fundamental part of the subject\u2026What needs to be found is the characteristic pose, that which expresses not this or that moment but all moments, the complete individual. (English translation from the chapter titled \u201cThe Photograph Pose\u201d in Dianne W. Pitman<\/span> Bazille: Purity, Pose and Painting in the 1860s<\/em> (Pennsylvania University Press, 1998), 108-9).<\/span><\/blockquote>\r\n
5.3\r\n| Portrait Photography, Art, and Aesthetics<\/h1>\r\n
Born the only child of a haberdasher in 1820 in the outskirts of Paris, Le Gray studied painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche, and made his first daguerreotypes by at least 1847. His real contributions\u2014artistically and technically\u2014however, came in the realm of paper photography, in which he first experimented in 1848. The first of his four treatises, published in 1850, boldly, and correctly, asserted that \u201cthe entire future of photography is on paper.\u201d In that volume, Le Gray outlined a variation of William Henry Fox Talbot\u2019s process calling for the paper negatives to be waxed prior to sensitization, thereby yielding a crisper image.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5341\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Gustave Le Gray, Self-portrait, <\/cite>ca. 1850-55. Albumen silver print mounted on cardboard on salted paper from a collodion glass negative. 20.5 x 16.4 cm. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5342\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Gustave Le Gray, Eugenie, Empress of the French, <\/cite> 1856. Albumen silver print from a collodion glass negative. 23.4 x 18.3 cm (image). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nBy the time Le Gray was assigned a Mission H\u00e9liographique<\/em> by the French government in 1851, he had already established his reputation with portraits,\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5343\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Gustave Le Gray, Forest of Fontainebleau, <\/cite> 1855. Albumen silver print. 32 x 41 cm. National Museum, Warsaw. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nviews of Fontainebleau Forest,\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5344\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Gustave Le Gray, [View of the Seine, Paris], 1857. Albumen silver print from glass negative. 38.5 x 50.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nand Paris scenes.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5345\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Gustave Le Gray, The Ramparts of Carcassonne, <\/cite>1851. Salted paper print from waxed paper negative. 223.5 x 33.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nLe Gray\u2019s mission took him to the southwest of France, beginning with the ch\u00e2teaux of the Loire Valley, continuing with churches on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela and eventually to the medieval city of Carcassonne just prior to \u201crestoration\u201d of its thirteenth-century fortifications by Viollet-le-Duc.\r\n\r\nIn the 1852 edition of his treatise, Le Gray wrote: \u201cIt is my deepest wish that photography, instead of falling within the domain of industry, of commerce, will be included among the arts. That is its sole, true place, and it is in that direction that I shall always endeavor to guide it. It is up to the men devoted to its advancement to set this idea firmly in their minds.\u201d To that end, he established a studio, gave instruction in photography (fifty of Le Gray\u2019s students are known, including major figures such as Charles N\u00e8gre, Henri Le Secq, \u00c9mile P\u00e9carr\u00e8re, Olympe Aguado, Nadar, Adrien Tournachon, and Maxime Du Camp), and provided printing services for negatives by other photographers.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5346\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> \u201cSalons de l\u2019\u00e9tablissement photographique de M. LeGray, boulevard des Capucines, no. 35,\u201d L\u2019illustration, Journal Universel,<\/cite> April 12, 1856. Wood engraving. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nOpening of Gustave Le Gray's Studio, 35 Blvd des Capucines, Paris, 1856.\u00a0 L'Illustration<\/em>, Journal Universel,<\/em> 27, no 685 (April 12, 1856): 240\r\nFlush with success and armed with 100,000 francs capital from the marquis de Briges, he established \u201cGustave Le Gray et Cie\u201d in the fall of 1855 and opened a lavishly furnished portrait studio at 35 boulevard des Capucines (a site that would later become the studio of Nadar and the location of the first Impressionist exhibition). L\u2019Illustration<\/em>, in April 1856, described the opulence intended to match the tastes and aspirations of Le Gray\u2019s clientele: \u201cFrom the center of the foyer, whose walls are lined with Cordoba leather \u2026 rises a double staircase with spiral balusters, draped with red velvet and fringe, leading to the glassed-in studio and a chemistry laboratory. In the salon, lighted by a large bay window overlooking the boulevard, is a carved oak armoire in the Louis XIII style \u2026 Opposite over the mantelpiece, is a Louis-XIV-style mirror \u2026 [and] various paintings arranged on the rich crimson velvet hanging that serves as backdrop \u2026 Lastly on a Venetian table of richly carved and gilded wood, in mingled confusion with Flemish plates of embossed copper and Chinese vases, are highly successful test proofs of the eminent personages who have passed before M. Le Gray\u2019s lens\u2026However, the principal merit of the establishment is the incomparable skill of the artist\u2026Despite a steady stream of wealthy clients, the construction and lavish furnishing of his studio ran up huge debts\u2026On February 1, 1860, Gustave Le Gray et Cie was dissolved.<\/blockquote>\r\n
5.4\r\n| Felix Nadar:\r\nBeyond the Documentary Portrait<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> F\u00e9lix Nadar, Nadar<\/cite> [demonstration photograph], ca. 1890-1910. Albumen silver print from glass negative. 14.5 x 10.5 cm. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nNadar (Gaspard-F\u00e9lix Tournachon), the flamboyant French portrait photographer caricaturist, writer, and aerial photographer, was Gustave Le Gray's student. The name Nadar derives from his political caricature-related moniker, tourne a dard<\/em> which means \"biting sting.\"\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5348\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Panth\u00e9on Nadar,<\/cite> 1854. Lithograph. 81.9 x 114.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5349\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Detail of Nadar, Panth\u00e9on Nadar, <\/cite>1854. Lithograph. 81.9 x 114.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nNadar included himself among the two hundred prominent Parisians, each carefully articulated with identifying characteristics and idiosyncrasies. These lithographs reflect the elements that remained consistently important to Nadar: first, the carefully observed likenesses that captured his subjects' qualities and accomplishments and second, the celebrity status bestowed on his work and himself, by virtue of the individuals represented.\r\n\r\nJullian Lerner has devoted considerable attention to Nadar\u2019s self-portraits as \u201cperformative specimens\u201d deployed for social purposes. He writes in Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography<\/em> (Routledge, 2021):\u00a0\"Nadar seems to have understood his likeness and his life story as signatures too\u2014distinctive flourishes that could be amplified and redrawn to produce an identifiable pattern. He made an astounding number of self-portraits. There were literary and graphic self-portraits in the comic press, on party invitations, and in works of art criticism. Each charged portrait underscored the same peculiar Nadarian traits.\"\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5350\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Nadar, Nadar, Les Binettes contemporaines, <\/cite>ca. 1854. Wood engraving. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe traits he made sure he captured in his self-image included his spindly appearance, messy red hair that was as unruly as his opinions, and his lively eyes.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5351\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Atelier Nadar, 35 Boulevard des Capucines, 1860. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nBy 1858, three years after opening his first studio Nadar was one of Europe's most celebrated portrait photographers. In 1860 he moved to lavish new studios on the Boulevard des Capucines.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5352\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Interior of the studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines,<\/cite> ca. 1861. Albumen silver print from a collodion glass plate negative. 23.7 x 16.8 cm. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5353\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, View of the interior of the studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, with Nadar\u2019s Pantheon, <\/cite> ca. 1861. Albumen silver print from a collodion glass plate negative. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHis atelier attracted the elite society of the boulevard, the intelligentsia of Paris, and the leading bohemian lights of the era, including artists, actors, and writers.\r\n\r\nThere was not just one, but several Nadars. Along with F\u00e9lix, his brother Adrien and son Paul also abandoned their last name and adopted the pseudonym that F\u00e9lix had come up with. And yet, there is just one Nadar, more precisely a brand, a collective singular that refers not only to a family, but also to a firm that employed a great many collaborators. In the 19th century, Nadar was a brand with a powerful cultural aura. (\u201cThe Nadars: A Photographic Legend\u201d\u00a0 http:\/\/expositions.bnf.fr\/les-nadar\/en\/the-art-of-the-portrait.html)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5354\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Gustave Dor\u00e9\u2019s Portrait,<\/cite> ca. 1883. Woodburytype. 23 x 18.9 cm. British Library, London. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn contrast to his rivals, Nadar equated his work with art rather than industry or science,\u00a0his portraits aspiring to aesthetic significance and commercial success. He added value to his photographic images by exploring the psychological dimension of his sitters, aiming to reveal their personalities, not just produce attractive photos. His subjects were directly and naturally posed, in contrast to his contemporaries' stiff formality\u00a0and prop use.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5355\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, \u00c9douard Manet,<\/cite> ca. 1867-70. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe space of trusting exchange Nadar developed with his clients enhanced the descriptive potential of his portraits. Max Kozloff writes in \u201cNadar and the Republic of the Mind\u201d (Artforum <\/em>15 no. 1 (September 1976): 28-39): \u201cWith the latitude now permitted, or that welled up amiably in the \u2018contract\u2019 between photographer and sitter, facial mobility came into its own.\u201d\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5356\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Paul Nadar, [Photographs of his father F\u00e9lix Nadar with Michel-Eug\u00e8ne Chevreul, taken on August 18, 1886], Le Journal Illustr\u00e9,<\/cite>September 5, 1886. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]Kozloff continues,\r\nFor proof, one has only to look at the first published interview in the history of photography, in Le Journal Illustr\u00e9<\/em>, August 1886, for which Paul Nadar took innumerable shots of his father conversing with Chevreul, the famous chemist and color theoretician. Not only was this technically advanced, made possible through a fast shutter (1\/133 of a second), but it epitomized the ongoing candor that suffuses Nadar\u2019s portraits.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5359\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> \u00c9tienne-Jules Marey, Chronophotographie du saut en longueur, <\/cite> ca. 1882-83. Matte albumen print. 7.4 x 18.5 cm. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5360\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion. \u201cSallie Gardner,\u201d owned by Leland Stanford; running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June 1878, <\/cite> ca. 1878. Photographic print on card, albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nPerhaps even further, he might have wanted to demonstrate how to overcome the fragmentary aspect of the still photograph by multiplying stills through a short time span. In this he could be said to have hinted, in portraiture, at what Marey, whom he admired, and Muybridge, whose work he surely knew, were accomplishing in the representation of human and animal movement.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5361\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt, <\/cite>ca. 1864 (negative), and ca. 1924 (print). Gelatin silver print. 21.1 x 16.2 cm. Getty Center, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDuring the 19th century, photographers' clientele could help them achieve recognition and fame. Nadar cultivated his reputation as a celebrity photographer, and his growing notoriety reciprocally gave prestige to those able to commission a portrait by him.\r\n\r\nJullian Lerner explains Nadar's unique approach in Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography<\/em> (London: Routledge, 2021). Nadar\u2019s portraiture \u201c... was rarified and spiritual, the resemblance intimate and earnest, and the framing austere. Reducing the noise of backdrops, furnishings, and fashionable attire that cluttered the full-figure poses of rival studios, Nadar zoomed in on his sitters\u2019 faces.\u00a0 And because his premium full-plate prints (25 \u00d7 19 cm) were \u201clife-size, they staged an intense t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate between the sitter and the viewer.\"\r\n\r\nNadar eschewed the montage format because it disrupted the intimacy he sought, his \u201cquest for photographic purity and a truth of the face.\" His austere approach to portraiture complimented his famous sitters' intellectual, bohemian, and anti-materialist disposition. These friends were his preferred clientele early on, privy to discounted prices for prints while allowing him to keep the negatives for future dissemination. Lerner continues:\r\n\r\nThus Nadar accumulated a photographic \u201cimage bank\u201d of Contemporary Figures that he could exploit in a number of ways. He sold portraits to publishers, for use as the basis of illustrations in journals and books (reproduced for print publication in wood engraving). After 1861, he also sold celebrity portraits to anonymous buyers off the street, in the commercially optimized form of cartes de visite. At first reluctant to embrace this small, cheap, mass-producible format invented by his rival Andre-Adolphe-Eug\u00e8ne Disd\u00e9ri, Nadar eventually decided to cash in on the public\u2019s mania for celebrity cartes, which all manner of citizens avidly collected and arranged in albums alongside portraits of relatives and friends.\r\n\r\nNadar, the businessman, astutely cultivated a niche market and carefully catered to it. He rejected Napoleon's Republicanism to appeal to Bohemian independence and opposition. As such, he was an outlier. Others who aspired to succeed believed that achieving recognition required casting a wide net and adherence to academic criteria. For mainstream photographers, as Lerner explains, \"pinning their hopes on a marginal avant-garde whose own status was far from secure would be imprudent.\u201d\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5362\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Paul Nadar, View of the terrace of the studio on Rue d\u2019Anjou, on the Rue des Mathurins, <\/cite>ca. 1910. Silver print from a silver gelatin glass negative. 12.5 x 16 cm. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWhen the studio on Boulevard des Capucines declared bankruptcy due to over-expenditures, the Nadar firm moved to a more affordable site on Rue d\u2019Anjou. They gave up studios that boasted a rooftop terrace, a ground floor with a garden, a glass-roofed atrium, and enormous windows on the upper floors. Still, the Rue d\u2019Anjou studio had huge windows on the upper floors. Before the advent of artificial light and more sensitive processes, natural light was indispensable for taking and developing photographs.\u00a0 \u00a0\"...natural light was indispensable for taking and developing photographs... The photographers could create a range of variations and effects thanks to filtering blinds, and with reflectors and screens.\u201d(http:\/\/expositions.bnf.fr\/les-nadar\/en\/the-art-of-the-portrait.html#the-studios)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5363\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Nadar in a Balloon,<\/cite> ca. 1860-70. Photographic print. 10.3 x 6.5 cm. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5364\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Nadar, Aerial view of Paris, Arc de Triomphe, <\/cite>1868. Brown University Library, Providence. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nNadar was a personality that thrived on adventure. His interests extended well beyond photography, as Philip McCouat writes in \u201cPhotography, Ballooning, Invention and the Impressionists.\u201d (https:\/\/www.artinsociety.com\/the-adventures-of-nadar-photography-ballooning-invention--the-Impressionists.html):\r\n\r\nPhotography, while absorbing, was by no means Nadar\u2019s only interest. Along with several of his friends, including Jules Verne and Victor Hugo, he was fascinated by the idea of human flight. Accordingly, during the 1850s, Nadar enthusiastically began hot-air ballooning.\r\n\u200b\r\nBallooning offered an escape from the cares of the world. He described the sensation of ascending as a \u201dfree, calm, levitating into the silent immensity of welcoming and beneficent space,\u201d which presented \u201can admirable spectacle\u2026. an immense carpet without borders\u2026 what purity of lines, what extraordinary clarity of sight\u2026 with the exquisite impression of a marvellous, ravishing cleanliness!\u201d\r\n\r\nFor Nadar, the sublime views obtained from an aerial balloon floating above the city were a compelling \u201cinvitation to the lens.\u201d They spurred his\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5365\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> \u00c9douard Manet, View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, <\/cite>1867. Oil on canvas. 196 x 108 cm. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nManet's View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle<\/em> would not have been as complete a view of modern Paris without the inclusion of Nadar hovering over the city in an air balloon, as seen at the top right of the composition.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5366\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Nadar, Catacombs of Paris<\/i>, 1861. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nMcCouat continues:\r\nNot content with photographing from the air, Nadar had also begun on a novel project to photograph <\/span>underground<\/em>, using only electric light. This would pose some considerable challenges. Photography had always been associated with light, its very name means \u201ca drawing of light,\u201d\u00a0 and here was Nadar saying that he could take photographs without any natural light at all.<\/span><\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5367\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> F\u00e9lix Nadar, When I Was a Photographer<\/i>, trans. Eduardo Cadava, and Liana Theoduratou (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015; first published: Paris: Flammarion, 1899). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn 1900, towards the end of his life, Nadar published Quand j\u2019\u00e9tais photographe<\/em>, translated into English and published by MIT Press in 2015. The book offers a collection of anecdotal vignettes, numerous portraits and character sketches, and meditations on his photographic history.\r\n\r\nNadar's explorations into the bust-length portrait remained his primary source of livelihood. Along with the full-length carte-de-visite developed by Disd\u00e9ri, these two modes of portrait photography dominated the field from around 1855 until 1870.\r\n\r\nTheir differences may seem minute, but they are significant. The commercial carte was inexpensive and readily available. The bust-length portrait, considered of greater aesthetic value, was the province of the elite. The carte's attention to pose, clothing, accessories and setting reflected a sitter's status, whereas faces and personalities could not be easily discerned. Nadar's three-quarter view, on the other hand, with its focus on facial expression and attention to aesthetic conventions, could render more unique portrayals.\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5369\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWalter Benjamin writes:\r\nThese images were taken in rooms where every customer came to the photographer as a technician of the newest school. The photographer, however, came to every customer as a member of a rising class and enclosed him in an aura which extended even to the folds of his coat or the turn of his bow tie. For that aura is not simply the product of a primitive camera. At that early stage, object and technique corresponded to each other as decisively as they diverged from one another in the immediately subsequent period of decline. Soon, improved optics commanded instruments which completely conquered darkness and distinguished appearances as sharply as a mirror.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5370\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Nadar, M. Zola, \u00e9crivain,<\/cite> ca. 1893-94. Albumen silver print. 31.5 x 18.5 cm. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHowever, Benjamin overlooked the evolvement of portrait photographic experimentation in Paris.\r\n\r\nThe photographer Paul Cardon, known as Dornac, specialized in photographic portraits of famous men in their homes or at work. \u00a0Active from the late 1880s, his images were published in Nos contemporains chez eux.<\/em> His innovative process relied on the fact that dry plates could be prepared in advance and developed long after exposure, eliminating the need for a portable darkroom.\r\n\r\nElizabeth Emery, in \u201c\u2018Dornac\u2019s at Home\u2019 Photographs, Relics of French History\u201d (Proceedings of the Western Society for French History<\/em> 36 (2008): 209\u2013224), writes about Dornac's \u2018at home\u2019 photographs and their implications for the fin-de-si\u00e8cle<\/em> cult of celebrity:\r\nAs the camera began to chronicle the private life of public figures and as editors published these images in the flourishing periodical industry, viewers became aware of the milieu surrounding famous figures. No longer mysterious and untouchable, grands hommes<\/em> (\"great men,\" though well-known women were also occasionally included under this rubric) began to be treated like scientific specimens on display in their native \"habitats.\" Photography was thus partly responsible for facilitating a shift from interest in grands hommes<\/em> as revered national heroes, worthy of public monuments, to more intimate and obsessive celebrity cults housed in private rooms, apartments, and museums.\r\n\u2026\r\nGaston Tissandier, renowned pioneer of hot air balloons, editor of the journal, the author of books about photography, and himself a figure in the Nos Contemporains<\/em> series, paired the photographs with accompanying texts in which he qualified Dornac's goals as eminently \u2018scientific.\u2019\r\n\r\nThe influence of Dornac's endeavour spilled over into the commercial studios of photographers such as F\u00e9lix Nadar, Pierre Petit, and \u00c9tienne Carjat. They appropriated his ideas by creating staged settings that recreated domestic backgrounds. This is visible, for example, in Zola<\/em> by Nadar, where one can see the canvas roll of the backdrop visible on the floor. The table is equally a prop, reappearing elsewhere in Nadar's works, such as in the portrait of Edmond de Goncourt.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5433\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Dornac, \u00c9mile Zola,<\/cite> ca. 1887-1917. From the album of photos Nos contemporains chez eux. <\/cite>Albumen or aristotype photograph from gelatin silver bromide negative. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn contrast, the authenticity of Dornac's photographs remained constant. He captured minute details that were, according to Tissandier, \"witnesses of their thoughts and works\u2026\" He believed that Dornac's use of photography, his emphasis on what was there as opposed to what was imagined, made \"the most precious auxiliary of the exact sciences...\"\r\n\r\nEmery:\r\nThe early nineteenth-century ideal of a \u2018monument in stone,\u2019 an authorized image of the \u2018great man\u2019 erected in a public space to commemorate his cultural importance, thus gave way, as we have seen, to much more fragmented and complex images, often disseminated by photographs, by which the public sought to understand famous figures more fully\u2026 Dornac's \u2018at home\u2019 photographs went a step further, creating the illusion of even greater intimacy by providing access to the environment in which grands hommes<\/em> lived and worked. By shifting emphasis from physical appearance to milieu, his series allowed viewers to vest the objects surrounding his famous subjects with near-magical powers: as \u2018relics,\u2019 they seemed to retain some of the spirit of those who had touched them.<\/blockquote>\r\nSuch evolutionary advances in photography as a medium of visual communication and expression testify to its permeating influence in society within short decades of its birth. As Malcolm Daniel has asserted, \"The medium\u2019s most profound and lasting expressions, however, were no longer the work of its leading professionals, but rather of those who consciously set themselves apart from the accepted rules of commercial practice and took photography into new arenas of technique, subject, and expression.\"\r\n
5.5\r\n| Julia Margaret Cameron: Art Photography and Pictorialism<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> George Frederic Watts,\u00a0Julia Margaret Cameron, <\/cite>ca. 1850-1852. Oil on canvas. 61 cm x 50.8 cm. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCameron may have entered the field as an amateur female photographer, but she approached her work professionally. She deliberately marketed and exhibited her photographs but made clear that her interests were not in pursuing commercial portrait photography. Cameron considered herself an artist and described her aspirations \"to ennoble photography and to secure it for the character and uses of high art\u201d to her mentor, the scientist Sir John Herschel.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5435\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir John F. W. Herschel,<\/cite> 1867.\u00a0Carbon print.\u00a034 \u00d7 26.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art,\u00a0MOMA Object number: 832.1965. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCameron's stylistic manipulations are in evidence in this portrait of Herschel, a scientist and experimental photographer. The MOMA entry for the work describes it as follows:\r\nNo commercial portrait photographer of the period would have portrayed Herschel as Cameron did here, devoid of classical columns, weighty tomes, scientific attributes, and academic poses\u2014the standard vehicles for conveying the high stature and classical learning that one\u2019s sitter possessed (or pretended to possess)... she had him wash and tousle his hair to catch the light, draped him in black, brought her camera close to his face, and photographed him emerging from the darkness like a vision of an Old Testament prophet.<\/blockquote>\r\nCameron employed wet collodion\u00a0on glass negatives and\u00a0albumen prints to apply the aesthetic principles of painting to portrait photographs.\u00a0 She was among the first to combine close cropping with softly focused imagery, moving her work beyond objective representation. Determined to capture the essence and character of her subjects, Cameron engaged the ethereal and dreamlike impressions created by the combination of diffused focus, manipulated lighting, veiling shadows, and expressive posture.\r\n\r\nJulia Margaret Cameron was 48 years old in 1863 when she received her first camera as a birthday present from her daughter and son-in-law. The gift, meant to be a fun distraction, inspired the career of one of the finest Victorian-era portrait photographers.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5436\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Julia Margaret Cameron.\u00a0Annie Wilhelmina Philpot. <\/cite>Albumen print. 188 x 145 mm. National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford. January 29, 1864. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nLiz Jobey describes the portrait of Annie Philpot, which Cameron called her \"first success,\" in First Light<\/em>, her review of the exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th-Century Photographer of Genius<\/em> held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2003.\r\n\r\n(https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2003\/jan\/18\/photography.artsfeatures):\r\nAt 1pm on January 29, 1864, a little girl with cherubic features and scraggy, shoulder-length hair was buttoned into her winter coat, waiting patiently for her photograph to be taken. In front of her, a short, stocky, middle-aged woman fitted another glass plate into the back of her huge camera and begged the child to keep still. She was probably counting, too; it could take up to five minutes for the image to be fully exposed. If the girl was bored, she didn't show it. Her face, turned in half-profile to catch the light, was composed but alive, its curves heightened by the contrast between shadow and light. It was a happy result - we know, because the photographer wrote to the girl's father later that day: \"My first perfect success in the complete Photograph owing greatly to the docility & sweetness of my best and fairest little sitter. This Photograph was taken by me at 1pm Friday Jan 29th Printed Toned - fixed and framed all by me & given as it now is by 8pm this same day Jan 29th 1864. Julia Margaret Cameron.\"<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5437\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, <\/cite> 1869 (printed 1875).\u00a0 Image\/paper: 27.8 \u00d7 25.7 cm; Mount: 36.9 \u00d7 31.2 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, reference 1949.879. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCameron, of British descent but born in Calcutta, was a well-read, cultured woman with connections to literary, artistic, and scientific figures.Like Nadar, Cameron\u00a0set out to capture the elite world of celebrities she frequented. She did so because she had ease of access to her subjects and strategically, knowing that portraits of Britain\u2019s stars were more likely to attract sales and future clients. Cameron\u2019s portraits, included the celebrated poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (a friend and neighbour at Freshwater),\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5438\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Julia Margaret Cameron,\u00a0 Photographic study \"Pomona\" (Alice Liddell as a young woman), <\/cite> 1872.\u00a0The Yorck Project\". 5000 Meisterwerke der Photographie des 19. Jahrhunderts. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nand Alice Liddell (who was also a photographic subject for Lewis Carroll as a child and inspired the 1865 children's classic novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland<\/em>),\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5439\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Julia Stephen born Julia Jackson, mother of Virginia Woolf, <\/cite> April 1867. Albumen silver print from wet collodion negative. 27.6 x 22.0 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Harriott A. Fox Endowment, 1968.227. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nas well as her niece Julia Stephen, the mother of the author Virginia Woolf.\r\n\r\nCameron defied photography's early conventions, \"using dramatic lighting and forgoing sharp focus in favour of conscientiously artistic effects that appealed to viewers familiar with Rembrandt\u2019s chiaroscuro and the traditions of Romanticism.\" The photographic press severely criticized her for her bold disregard for sharp detail and seamless printing that ensured the \"correct\" replication of reality, to which she replied, \u201cWhat is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?\u201d\u00a0 (Nineteenth Century Photography, \u00a0https:\/\/arthistoryteachingresources.org\/lessons\/nineteenth-century-photography\/)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5440\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Edward Steichen,\u00a0Rodin\u2014The Thinker, <\/cite>1905.\u00a0Gum bichromate print. 39.6 x 48.3cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5441\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Alfred Steiglitz, \"Miss S.R\",<\/cite>\u00a01904.\u00a0\u00a0Camera Work, No 12 1905. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHer approach and aesthetic sensibilities would influence the future of the international Pictorialist movement, which insisted on personal expression and the recognition of the medium as fine art and was popularized by slightly later practitioners such as Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz.\r\n\r\nAs Mina Markovic, in an introductory text on the artist for the National Gallery of Canada (https:\/\/www.gallery.ca\/photo-blog\/focus-on-the-collection-julia-margaret-cameron-1815-1879), concludes: \"Following her death in 1879, Cameron\u2019s influence on early art photography persisted\u2026. Cameron is one of the few 19th-century women photographers consistently recognized for her contributions to the photo-historical canon.\"\r\n5.6\r\n| Modern Impressionist Portrait Paintings and The Impact of Photographic Techniques<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Gustave Courbet, Proudhon and His Children, <\/cite>1865. Oil on canvas. 186.5 x 236 cm. Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5443\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Nadar, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, <\/cite> ca. 1860. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCourbet's Proudhon and His Children,<\/em> for example, painted posthumously from a photograph, does not lack in likeness or characterization for its source; rather it is enhanced by details captured as a visual record of a past moment in time\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5444\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Franz von Lenbach, Portrait of Richard Wagner, <\/cite>ca. 1878. Oil on panel. 71.5 x 55.5 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe German artist Franz von Lenbach advocated for the use of photographs as a basis for portraiture and was among the earliest painters to do so. \u00a0His first portrait commissions date after 1881, when he was awarded a third-class medal for one of his portraits at the Grande Exposition in Paris.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5445\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Louis Figuier, \u201cFig. 79 \u2013\u00a0Effet de l\u2019appareil de M. Monckhoven pour l\u2019agrandissement des \u00e9preuves photographiques,\u201d in Les Merveilles de la science ou description Populaire des inventions modernes ou description Populaire des inventions modernes,<\/cite> vol. 3 (Paris: Livrairie Furne, Jouvet et cie, 1869), 123. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nLenbach utilized a method invented by the Belgian photochemist and professional photographer D\u00e9sir\u00e9 van Monckhoven that projected a photographic image onto a canvas as an under-sketch, a technique called photo-sciagraphy. In 1863 van Monckhoven registered a patent for an optical apparatus that enlarged imagery by projection, for which he received a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Soon after, he began manufacturing a device that could be built into a darkroom wall.\r\n\r\nLenbach's process involved taking several photographs of a sitter in different poses, which he then enlarged on a canvas, outlined in paint, and added tone and colour. By the second time a sitter arrived, their portrait was nearly complete.\r\n\r\nCarola Muysers explains Lenbach\u2019s procedure in\u00a0 \u201cPhysiology and Photography: The Evolution of Franz von Lenbach\u2019s Portraiture\u201d (Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide<\/em> 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002), http:\/\/www.19thc-artworldwide.org\/autumn02\/256-physiology-and-photography-the-evolution-of-franz-von-lenbachs-portraiture):\r\nBy the early 1880s the portraitist regularly hired professional photographers such as Friedrich Wendling, Adolf Baumann, and Karl Hahn to photograph his sitters, an effort made easier by the dry plates that had recently come on the market, and by the box camera.\r\n\r\nLenbach himself described his new method: \"Once I have drawn the figure from life (and I always do that first) and I have had the movement photographed, it becomes a matter of fleshing it out with the help of photography and the imagination.\" What distinguished Lenbach's method was not the production of portraits with the aid of sketches and photographs but his use of photographs of movement and his decision to \"flesh out\" these photographs rather than slavishly copy them.<\/blockquote>\r\nThe following example illustrates Lenbach's standard procedure. About 1895 the artist was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Egyptologist Georg Ebers. Ebers came to Lenbach's studio in the company of his son Hermann, who left an account of what occurred there. The artist began by replacing Ebers's uninspiring coat with a dark, fur-trimmed cape and the slouch hat of a scholar. Under the pretext of getting to \"know the model by heart,\" he first engaged the sitter in conversation, in the course of which Hermann heard clicking sounds behind some black curtains. It turned out that Karl Hahn was snapping photographs of the subject whenever Lenbach gave him a discreet hand signal.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5446\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"500\"]
<\/a> Karl Hahn, Four Portrait Studies of Georg Ebers, <\/cite>ca. 1895. Photographs. Lenbacharchiv Neven-Dumont, Cologne. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFour of the twenty photographs Hahn took during that session survive. All show Ebers before a white background and the differences between his poses are slight, yet the psychological effects are astonishingly varied. In one shot, Ebers tilts his head forward menacingly, his eyes hidden by the brim of the hat. A second shows him standing straight and looking up to the left with a fixed, hostile gaze. In the third, he looks directly at the viewer, and a slight twist of the head and body lends a sense of energetic movement to the whole. The fourth photograph captures a glowering Ebers holding the hat in his hand.\r\n\r\nThe Ebers series shows that Lenbach had two major concerns. One was that the sitter not be conscious of being photographed. The other was that the sitter respond naturally, rather than fall into an stereotypical yet uncharacteristic pose.\r\n\r\nHow did Lenbach \"flesh out\" his portraits? In other words, how did he move from the photographs of movement to the finished portrait? The artist would paste a series of snapshots on a piece of cardboard. (At first he used single shots, later contact prints.) Seeing these movements in sequence gave him a sense of the range of the sitter's expressions and helped Lenbach select the most characteristic one for the portrait. Once the best parts of several photographs had been selected, the artist copied them onto his canvas. Beginning with such traditional aids as square grids, Lenbach proceeded to tracings and finally to photopeinture<\/em>. In this last method he would enlarge and print a negative on a specially prepared canvas, placing washes on the barely visible positive that was ultimately covered with lights and shades. The painting was never an exact copy of a single photograph, however, as the artist often incorporated elements from several photographs and drawings.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5447\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Franz von Lenbach, Self-portrait,<\/cite> ca. 1902-03. Oil on paperboard. 99 x 87.5 cm. Lenbachhaus, Munich. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nLenbach used this technique to paint his self-image throughout his career. In this last one, executed a year before his death, he depicts himself standing face forward as he leans onto a console to his left. His direct gaze is penetrating, entirely focused on the viewer.\r\n5.7\r\n| Edgar Degas and the Influence of Photography<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Edgar Degas, Edmond Duranty, <\/cite>1879. Gouache and pastel on canvas. 100 x 100 cm. Burrell Collection, Glasgow. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAs Linda Nochlin reminds us in Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now<\/em> (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2022),\r\nIn a way, photography forced a certain innovativeness on ambitious artists. Today we cannot easily envision a world without the mass production and consumption of images \u2013 specifically, images of ourselves, our families, and our friends in the form of the snapshot, the wedding picture, or the class photograph \u2013 any more than we can envision a world without the mass production of clothing or other consumer products. The easy availability of images is so much a part of our experience that we cannot even imagine a situation in which a portrait might be a once-in-lifetime experience rather than an ongoing, multiple record of personal appearance and situation. The Impressionists lived in and reacted to a world in which the richness of individual and communal memory itself was being replaced by a plethora of cheap visual imagery.<\/blockquote>\r\nUnlike photographers, Impressionist painters rarely took on commissions for portraits. Rather, they painted self-portraits, single and group portraits of friends and family, and pictures of colleagues and patrons. These portraits paid attention to the fragmented or absent context without losing sight of the individuality of the sitter. Contrary to Disd\u00e9ri\u2019s advice to photographers to select a pose that somehow represented the sitter\u2019s typical attitude and expression, Impressionist portraits preferred postures and gestures that conveyed a spontaneous moment in time.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5449\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle peinture: \u00c0 propos du groupe d\u2019artistes qui expose dans les galleries Durand-Ruel <\/cite>(Paris: E. Dentu, 1876). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDuranty\u2019s La Nouvelle peinture (The New Painting)<\/em> of 1876, written on the occasion of the second Impressionist exhibition, echoed Degas's outlook. He called for the study of \"the relationship of a man to his home, or the particular influence of his profession on him as reflected in the gestures he makes\" and \"the scrutiny of the aspects of the environment in which he evolves and develops.\"\r\nFarewell to the human body treated like a vase with a decorative, swinging curve; farewell to the uniform monotony of the frame working ...\u00a0what we need is the particular note of the modern individual, in his clothing, in the midst of his\u00a0social habits, at home or in the street .... By means of a back, we want a temperament, an age, a social condition to be revealed; through a pair of\u00a0hands, we should be able to express a magistrate or a tradesman; by a gesture, a whole series of feelings.<\/blockquote>\r\nDuranty argued that reality was perceived in flux and from varying perspectives. Unlike a camera, set up to capture a fixed view, a person's view of a subject could alternate, \u00a0it is \"\u2026 sometimes very high, sometimes very low, missing the ceiling, getting at objects from their undersides, unexpectedly cutting off the furniture ... He is not always seen as a whole: sometimes he appears cut off at mid-leg, half-length, or longitudinally. At other times, the eye takes him in from close-up, at full height, and throws all the rest of a crowd in the street or groups gathered in a public place back into the small scale of the distance.\"\r\n\r\nDuranty attempted to construct a vocabulary of \"modern observation\" based on analyzing physical, social, and racial characteristics. Degas himself wrote in his notebook: \"Make of expressive heads (academic style) a study of modern feeling-it is Lavater, but a more relativistic Lavater so to speak, with symbols of today rather than the past.\"\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5450\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Johann Kaspar Lavater, \u201cPhlegmatic,\u201d \u201cCholeric,\u201d \u201cSanguine,\u201d and \u201cMelancholic,\u201d in Physiognomische Fragmente zur Bef\u00f6rderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe<\/cite> (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1778). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5451\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Jean Gaspard Lavater [Johann Kaspar Lavater], Essai sur la physiognomonie, destin\u00e9 \u00e0 faire conna\u00eetre l\u2019Homme & \u00e0 le faire aimer,<\/cite> trans. Antoine-Bernard Caillard, and Marie-\u00c9lisabeth de La Fite, vol. 2 (La Have, 1783). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]Johann Kaspar Lavater was a Swiss poet, writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian well-known in England, Germany, and France for his so-called scientific book, Fragmente zur Bef\u00f6rderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe,<\/em> which was originally published between 1775 and 1778. He believed that physiognomy related to specific character traits in people. He illustrated this theory through a series of profile portraits to demonstrate how moral character could be discerned through an analysis of \u201clines of countenance.\u201d\r\n\r\nBoth Duranty and Degas had devised a response to theories of expression and character, including Lavater\u2019s analysis of human countenance and how it expressed emotion. \u00a0Degas\u2019s musings on physiognomy explain the importance of his portraits of the person's gestures,\u00a0 physiognomy, and individualized emotions.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5452\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Edgar Degas, Diego Martelli, <\/cite>1879. Oil on canvas. 110.4 x 99.8 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.