1195
pictures during and after the events of the Commune,
some of which were again interpreted in engravings.
A commercial portraitist, he was also interested from
the early 1850s in passport photos and identity cards,
and in January 1853 establsihed a program for passports
with photographs in front of the ministry for Justice.
Thereafter he seemed to have worked sporadically for
the Prefecture of Police force: in 1869, in particular,
he made and marketed negatives of the victims of the
Troppmann assassin. In addition, as a photographer on
behalf of the Ministry for Agriculture and the Trade,
he regularly created images of the animals of the an-
nual agricultural shows of Poissy, Paris, and Chartres.
Several of these images were presented at the time of
the various expositions in which it took part. He also
left stereoscopic images, in particular some daguerreo-
types of nude females. The last mention that one fi nds
of Richebourg dates to 1872, in Moniteur de la Pho-
tographie. One does not know with certainty his date
of death. His abundant body of work is found in public
collections in France and abroad.
Quentin Bajac
Further Reading
Michèle et Michel Auer, Encyclopédie internationale des pho-
tographes de 1839 à nos jours, Hermance, éditions Camera
Obscura.
Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes, Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Anne Mac Cauley, Industrial Madness, Commercial Photography
in Paris, 1848–1871, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1994.
Bernard Marbot et Weston Naef, Regards sur la photographie en
France au XIXe siècle, catalogue d’exposition, Petit Palais,
Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1980.
RIGBY, LADY ELIZABETH EASTLAKE
(1809–1893)
English artist, writer, and critic
Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake was born in Norwich on
November 17th 1809, daughter of the obstetrician and
gentleman farmer, Dr. Edward Rigby. After spending
extended periods of time abroad in Germany and Esto-
nia she settled in Edinburgh between 1842 and 1849,
where her tenancy of the city coincided almost exactly
with the photographic partnership of Hill and Adamson.
In Edinburgh, she became one of Hill and Adamson’s
early and most frequent sitters, sitting for about twenty
portraits. She married Charles Lock Eastlake in 1849
and moved to London where she continued to publish
reviews for the periodical press, mainly in the area of the
visual arts and to translate and edit art-historical texts.
She died at her London home in 1893.
Elizabeth Rigby sat for her fi rst calotype portraits in
Hill and Adamson’s studio in the summer of 1843 and
formed opinions of the process to which she remained
faithful throughout her life. She expressed her thoughts
on photography to her friend John Murray, publisher of
the Quarterly Review, soon after this fi rst sitting: ‘... I
venture to send you a few specimens, being assured that
you will appreciate their truth and beauty, though few
do. It appears to me that this is the only line of photo-
graphic drawing which can at all assist an artist—it was
absurd to think that any would supersede him. I send
you various specimens of the subjects to which it has
been turned here ... I have enclosed three of myself, not
the best impressions ... I admire myself very much, but
cannot get the world to agree with me. The downcast
eyes were a necessary consequence of the most brilliant
sun which prevented their being raised the least higher.
With old faces it is most successful—producing the most
exquisite Rembrandt effect. ...’
Fourteen years later, in April 1857, Eastlake wrote
one of the earliest critiques on photography, an article in
the Quarterly Review reviewing seven related publica-
tions. In large part the piece is a history of photography
distilling the information from the listed texts into a
reliable, chronologically arranged account of the devel-
opment of the processes collectively contributing to a
history of photography. Eastlake gives a lucid account
of the various chemical experiments in photography
up to 1857, ‘when the scientifi c processes on which
the practice depends are brought to such perfection
that, short of the coveted attainment of colour, no great
improvement can be further expected.’ (459) The more
discursive portions of Eastlake’s essay articulates mid
nineteenth-century debates about the status and rôle of
photography. Granting ‘Photography’ the upper case
and making it a feminine noun, like Art and Nature,
Eastlake proceeds to measure the artistic successes and
shortcomings of the photographic process in conveying
nature. She fi rst draws and then preserves a distinction
between photography as an art and photography as a
popular past time, the latter owing more to ‘the hunger
for facts.’ She is thus untroubled by claims that photog-
raphy will supersede art or supplant the work of artists,
convinced that ‘Photography is intended to supersede
much that art has hitherto done, but only that which
it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of
Art to do’ (466). She therefore views photography as
a means of relieving the artist of a ‘burden’ of ‘literal,
unreasoning imitation’ (466), arguing that ‘what she
[photography] does best is beneath the doing of a real
artist at all’ (467).
Eastlake was herself an amateur artist, skilled in
drawing portraits of friends and family and adept at
producing topographical views of cities and landscape
[4]. Eastlake sees photography as another form of draw-
ing, ‘the solar pencil’ (445), capable of communicating