281
The production and the reproduction and the diffusion
of the carte-de-visite portraits of Her Majesty the Queen,
and of the various members of the Royal Family, would
furnish materials for no ordinary chapter in the history of
popular Art.. .Without a doubt they will be required in
tens of thousands. They will have to fi nd a way into every
quarter of our sovereign’s wide dominions, and into every
city and town, both at home and in the colonies.. .These
royal cartes-de-visite leave far behind all other agencies
for enshrining our Sovereign’s person and her family in the
homes of her people. They do for everybody, as much as
Winterhalter can do for the Prince Consort himself.
“Cartes-de-visite,” Art Journal (1861) 306.By equating the possession of a royal carte with Franz
Winterhalter’s court portraits, the Art Journal is eulogis-
ing the intimacy of the personal insight that photography
offered.
From the early 1860s, the celebrity carte-de-visite
was an industry with its own London wholesale house,
Marion & Co., which stocked thousands of celebrity
photographs of every kind. In 1862, their manager
claimed that 50,000 cartes passed through the fi rm’s
hands every month. Forgeries of the celebrity photo-
graphs became commonplace and large profi ts were
made out of an immense number of quasi-illegal pic-
tures. Prosecutions took place regularly in the years
following the introduction of a revised Copyright Bill
in July 1862. Reported cases in the 1860s involved
photographs of the Princes of Wales and the Duke of
Cambridge. In France, there was a similarly thriving
trade in illegal celebrity photographs. Mayer et Pierson,
one of most successful Parisian studio of the 1850s,
sued Ledot and six other photographers in 1862 for
marketing counterfeit cartes of the emperor, empress
and other notables.
Copyright records of British photographs, which
were registered at Stationer’s Hall, are a quantitative
index to the celebrity photographs in circulation after
- Although they cannot reveal the volumes sold
of any one photograph, they do record the number of
portrait photographs registered of any one sitter. The
copyright records emphasise that, especially during
the 1860s and 1870s, the supply of celebrity cartes was
dominated by those of royalty, politicians, artists and the
leading clergy. Out of the fi rst 2000 photographs that
were registered, between 29 July 1862 and 11 September
1863, 317 contained one or more members of the British
royal family, a proportion of just over 15%. Between
1862 and 1900, the two sitters who had by far the largest
number of photographs registered for copyright were the
Prince and Princess of Wales. Only theatrical fi gures like
Lillie Langtry and Ellen Terry come close to the total
number of royal photographs registered.
The prominence of pictures of the various European
royal families emphasises the way that the fi rst celeb-
rity photographs were keyed into the existing social
hierarchies. Conversely though, the celebrity carte
was perceived to be democratic artefact, characterised
by an aesthetic of demythologising equality. Partly,
this was due to the changing status of photography: a
counterpoint to the concern that photography had been
debased into a vulgar medium was the claim that it
had been democratised into a universal one. Moreover,
whereas it was the traditional role of the portrait painter
to search after the ideal—and in so doing judiciously
fl atter the well-heeled sitter—the lens of the camera
was lauded for truthfully seeing alike all who sat before
it. In an article in Once a Week on the superseding of
the miniature portrait by the photograph, one com-
mentator sardonically commented that, “Tompkins of
Hopkins may submit to go down to posterity as livid,
corpse-like personages; but the Lady Blanche or the
fair Geraldine forbid it, Oh heavens!” In imposing the
unadorned realism of its technological format upon its
sitters, the camera had a demythologising effect upon
its celebrity sitters.
The equalising nature of the celebrity photograph
also stemmed from its status as a circulating com-
modity. In a second article in Once a Week, Andrew
Wynter compared the National Portrait Gallery, with
its reclusive opening hours of only three days a week,
to the accessibility of the street-portrait galleries of any
photographic establishment:CELEBRITY AND ROYALTY
Unknown. Frederick Douglass.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Rubel Collection,
Partial and Promised Gift of William Rubel, 2001 (2001.756)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.