Clara Pilvois
1850s–60s
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
Image: 5 3/8 × 4 5/8 in. (13.6 × 11.8 cm) Sheet: 10 3/8 × 13 3/4 in. (26.3 × 35 cm)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.588.1.40
Art Historical Context
Step into the elegant world of 19th-century portraiture with *Clara Pilvois*, captivating albumen silver print by pioneering French photographer André-Adol-Eugène Disd, created in the 1850s–60s. This image, measuring 5 3/8 × 4 5/8 inches, captures the subject with remarkable clarity and detail, thanks to the albumen process—a revolutionary technique using egg whites to bind light-sensitive silver salts onto paper from a glass negative. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Gilman Collection, it exemplifies the dawn of accessible photography. Disdéri transformed photography with his inven...
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...