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Antonio D'Alessandri - Pope Pius IX
Antonio D'Alessandri
Pope Pius IX
$1,250
Charles Dargère - Portrait of Onésipe Aguado
Charles Dargère
Portrait of Onésipe Aguado
$2,500
Andre Adolphe-Eugene Disderi - Jean-Baptiste Henri Durand-Brager, Photographer, Marine Painter and Printmaker
Andre Adolphe-Eugene Disderi
Jean-Baptiste Henri Durand-Brager, Photographer, Marine Painter and Printmaker
$3,500
Andre Adolphe-Eugene Disderi - Two Young Girls and Doll
Andre Adolphe-Eugene Disderi
Two Young Girls and Doll
$750
Jean-Baptiste Frenet - Brother and Sister
Jean-Baptiste Frenet
Brother and Sister
$2,500
Jean-Baptiste Frenet - Brother and Sister with Madame Frenet
Jean-Baptiste Frenet
Brother and Sister with Madame Frenet
$2,500
Jean-Baptiste Frenet - Father and Daughter
Jean-Baptiste Frenet
Father and Daughter
$2,500
Jean-Baptiste Frenet - Old Woman with Two Children in Winter Garb
Jean-Baptiste Frenet
Old Woman with Two Children in Winter Garb
$3,500
Jean-Baptiste Frenet - Two Young Boys, One in Military Dress and the Other Holding Book
Jean-Baptiste Frenet
Two Young Boys, One in Military Dress and the Other Holding Book
$3,500
Jean-Jacques Heilmann - The Guide Lanusse and his Family with the Father Pointing out the Sights and the Mother Spinning in Pau
Jean-Jacques Heilmann
The Guide Lanusse and his Family with the Father Pointing out the Sights and the Mother Spinning in Pau
$18,000
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson - John Ban Mackenzie, Piper to the Marquis of Breadalbane and the Highland Society
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
John Ban Mackenzie, Piper to the Marquis of Breadalbane and the Highland Society
$18,000
Frances B. Johnston - Gainsborough Girl
Frances B. Johnston
Gainsborough Girl
$250
By Matt Damsker

Photography's early decades were marked by an explosion of photo-portraiture in Great Britain, America and on the European continent. This exhibit collects a rich trove of vintage paper portraits, including wet-plate albumen and salt prints, cartes-de-visite, mounted oval cuts, and other diversely interesting specimens.

The authors range from anonymous photographers to great names in 19th-century artistry: Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Gustave Le Gray, and studio masters such as Andre Adolphe-Eugene Disderi and Pierre-Louis Pierson. Indeed, as a cross-section of European and American portrait photography at a moment of high energy and discovery, this collection is as compelling as it is vast.

The energy and discovery are evident in the large-family portraits, in which parents and children are massed together, making the most of the era’s first surge of domestic photo-documentation. These images convey the rich variety of family life, when it was not uncommon for parents to raise ten or more children. Other portraits are more eccentric, from Parisian street performers gathered in a studio to experimental images of, for example, painters depicted self-importantly (if not self-satirically) surrounded by their ornate picture frames.

As for style, the muted atmospheric touch of Julia Margaret Cameron always stands out in such photo assemblages, where studio portraiture and its conventions are the norm. Cameron was more expressively engaged--if not expressionistic--in her studies of the famous and the familial, and she captured abstract emotion like few others. Then there are the charming family images of Lewis Carroll, the great Victorian author and Londoner, who photographed subjects in English garden settings that convey a warm sense of place.

Similarly, Philadelphia's great painter, Thomas Eakins, captured family images with a pictorial eye, and the photography attributed to Eakins is excellent complement to Carroll's prints. As for the many others, the studio prevails in striking images of royalty, the rich and their children, by the likes of Pierre Louis-Pierson, while the magisterial work of Le Gray, Hill and Adamson, and images attributed to Nadar are all classic studies of the people who defined this transitional era in the arts and society.

19th-Century Paper Portraits
About This Exhibit
Image List

Exhibited and Sold By
Contemporary Works / Vintage Works, Ltd.

258 Inverness Circle
Chalfont, Pennsylvania   18914   USA

Contact Alex Novak and Marthe Smith

Email info@vintageworks.net

Phone +1-215-518-6962

Call for an Appointment

 

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