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many European publications. Other series include
Ernest Edward’s Portraits of Men of Eminence in Lit-
erature, Science, and Art (1863–67), Disdéri’s Gallerie
Des Contemporains, and the Album der Zeitgenossen
(Album of Contemporary Figures), which was started
in 1860 by two Munich photographers, Alois Löcherer
and Franz Hanfstaengl.
A second signifi cant type of early celebrity pictures
was the reproduction of portrait photographs as engrav-
ings. From the early 1850s, journals like the Illustrated
London News regularly used daguerreotypes as the basis
for portrait engravings. When the Illustrated News of
the World commenced publication in January 1858,
alongside its graphic news it printed the Drawing Room
Gallery of Eminent Personages. These were portrait
engravings by D.J. Pound after photographs by John
Jabez Edwin Mayall, accompanied by short biographi-
cal sketches. Included in the series were Queen Victoria
and Prince Albert, Lord Stanley and Charles Dickens.
Celebrity images were thus photographic well before
they were constituted wholly through photographs.
Celebrity portraiture in America followed a similar
path in that the 1850s saw attempts to create national
galleries and to utilize engravings of photographs. Mat-
thew Brady was the key fi gure in these early efforts to
promote the images of distinguished national person-
ages. In 1844, Brady opened his Daguerrian Miniature
Gallery at 205–207 Broadway, Fulton Street, with
another studio opening in Washington in 1849. Despite
the non-reproducibility of the daguerreotype, in 1850
Brady published his Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a
series of twelve lithographs of famous Americans made
after daguerreotypes. Subjects included Zachary Taylor
and John James Audobon. Brady’s portraits won a Gold
Medal at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and he contin-
ued to take photographs of distinguished personages.
In 1857 Harper’s Weekly published its fi rst engraving
of a portrait taken by Brady. In 1860 Brady famously
photographed the Republican presidential candidate
Abraham Lincoln, a picture that Harper’s Weekly sub-
sequently translated into a full-page front-cover wood-
engraving. In the same year, Brady also photographed
Edward, Prince of Wales, on his highly successful tour
of Canada and the United States. With the advent of
the fashion for carte-de-visites in the early 1860s, E.
& H.T. Anthony began to distribute large numbers of
Brady’s photographs.
One reason that the carte-de-visite marked the
meteoric rise of the celebrity photograph is that it was
reputedly only when photography became suffi ciently
fl attering that distinguished personages were prepared
to let their pictures enter public circulation. In 1861,
the Saturday Review claimed that, prior to the carte,
photography had distorted and exaggerated the promi-
nent features of the face to the extent that celebrities
had not been prepared to let themselves be revealed in
such unfl attering guises. As an article in the Quarterly
Review put it in 1864, “it gives you a kind of panoramic
view of your friend, and gives a prominence to his
best coat and trousers, which cast his features into the
shade”(“Photography,” Quarterly Review 116 (1864,
516).
A key fi gure in the popularisation of celebrity pho-
tographs in Europe is the Parisian photographer André
Adolphe Eugéne Disdéri. By 1857, Disdéri had begun
amassing portraits of the French royal family and its en-
tourage. His photographs of Napoleon III and Empress
Eugenie helped to start the fashion for celebrity carte-
de-visite, which became cultural phenomena across
Europe and North America. Between 1860 and 1862,
Disdéri published two one franc instalments each week
of a carte-de-visite portrait accompanied by four page
biographical sketch.
Photographs of the various European monarchs and
their families were amongst most successful celebrity
pictures. Disdéri’s published portraits of Napoleon III
and Empress Eugenie may well have provided a reas-
suring model for the publication of photographs of the
British royal family as, in August 1860, Mayall was
permitted to publish his Royal Album. It was not until
Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857 that pho-
tographs of the British royal family had been offi cially
shown in public for the fi rst time. And, while royal pho-
tographs had been shown at subsequent exhibitions of
the Photographic Society, these pictures had a singular
existence and were neither for sale nor reproduction.
Mayall’s Royal Album was a wholly different kind of
venture and was a phenomenal commercial success. Be-
tween 1860 and 1862, 3–4m copies of Queen Victoria’s
cartes were claimed to have been sold. Photographs
of monarchs such as Napoleon III and Queen Victoria
helped to promote the image of a patriotic and bourgeois
royal family. A photograph of the young French Prince
Imperial, for example, shows him dressed in a military
outfi t, wearing a hugely oversized busby and carrying
a drum. These is a similarly loyal carte from 1860 of
the future Kaiser Wilhelm II; a photograph by L. Haase,
entitled “Little Willy’s First Salute,” shows the infant
Prince saluting the camera.
With the pleasure of seeing photographs of well-
known personages for the fi rst time, collecting celebrity
cartes became the latest European fashion. In October
1861, the British Art Journal compared the collec-
tion of diverse cartes to an ad infi nitum multiplication
of national portrait galleries. Celebrity photographs
integrated well-known fi gures into the intimate arena
of individual subjectivity. The Art Journal specifi cally
drew attention to the importance of the cartes of the
British royal family through their creation of a shared
pattern of experience: