Baudelaire Photograph. by Baudelaire; CARJAT; PHOTOGRAPH; ETIENNE CARJAT - 1880

1880. BAUDELAIRE, Charles. Portrait for La Galerie Contemporaine by Etienne Carjat. Woodburytype print with artist's information printed on mount, 225 x 185 mm, matted and framed in polished dark wood. [Paris: Carjat, ca. 1862; published in La Galerie Contemporaine in 1878]. A literary photographic masterpiece. "Among the many nineteenth-century portraits, Carjat's Baudelaire has become an outstanding icon" (Icons of Photography). This carbon print was published posthumously in the popular anthology La Galerie Contemporaine; it is widely recognized as a literary photographic masterpiece, and has been continually reproduced down to the present day. "While portraits by Nadar strongly emphasize the poet's vain, foppish side, Carjat depicts the forty-one-year-old in the pose of a lonely intellectual who, bothered by all this picture-taking business, looks into the camera with an impatient and distrustful expression. Yet this very picture was to become the most renowned of all Baudelaire photographs" (Icons of Photography). Etienne Carjat (1828-1906), photographer of Daumier, Verlaine, and Rimbaud among other luminaries, created this brilliantly cast portrait of Baudelaire, perhaps the single most famous photograph of La Galerie Contemporaine and one of the finest literary photographic portraits of the nineteenth century. In fine condition. Victoria & Albert Museum, Guide to Early Photographic Processes, p. 91 and plate 30. Newhall, The History of Photography, p. 70. International Center of Photography, Encyclopedia of Photography, p. 99. On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, p. 101, plate 76. Langer, Icons of Photography, p. 55.