Portrait of Pertuiset as a Lion Hunter

~In 1860, when sales of carte de visite portraits were soaring thanks to the mass production of views of contemporary celebrities, the Goncourt brothers discussed with the caricaturist Gavarni what the future direction of his portraits should be. Gavarni told them that “he wanted to...

~As if to signal the demise of the traditional hierarchy of subject matter which placed portrait and landscape on a lower level than ‘history’ painting, Castagnary, in his review of 1867, announced that the portrait demanded the highest faculties of the painter, and represented the culmination of the art of painting. His reason was that ‘With a single portrait of Clouet, Holbein, Van Dyck, Titian, Rigaud, David, you can reconstruct, with the person who served as model, the entire epoch when that person lived.’ Castagnary, Salons, I,...