Berthe
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
Image: 18.4 × 24.8 cm (7 1/4 × 9 3/4 in.) Album page: 26.2 × 34.8 cm (10 5/16 × 13 11/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.588.2.78
Tags
Art Historical Context
In 1862, French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri *Berthe*, an exquisite albumen silver print from glass negative, showcasing his mastery of mid-19th-century portrait. Disdéri, a pioneer in photography, revolutionized the medium a decade earlier by inventing the *carte de visite*—compact, affordable portraits that swept through Europe and America, making photography accessible to the masses. Though *Berthe* is larger (18.4 × 24.8 cm), it reflects the same meticulous wet-collodion process on glass negatives, prized for its sharpness and tonal richness, coated with light-sensitive albume...
About the Artist
André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri · 1819–1889
**André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri** (1819–1889) was a pioneering French photographer whose innovations transformed portraiture into a mass medium during the Second Empire. Born on March 28, 1819, in Paris, Disdéri pursued diverse careers in commerce, acting, and politics early on, while studying art amid personal hardships following his father's death, which compelled him to support his mother, sibli...