[Portrait of a Woman]

Art Historical Context

In the mid-185s, as photography burst onto the scene as a revolutionary medium, Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Neaut captured this intimate *Portrait of a Woman* using a salted paper print from a glass negative. Created between 1854 and 1856, this 7¼ × 9⅛-inch image exemplifies the era's technical leap forward. Salted paper prints, pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot the 1830s, involved coating paper with a salt-silver solution and contact-printing it under a negative—here, a crisp glass one from the wet-collodion process introduced around 1851. This combination yielded warm, subtle tones ...

About the Artist

Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut · 1799–1872

Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut (1799–1872) was a French artist and early enthusiast of photography whose career bridged the worlds of traditional draughtsmanship and the new mechanical image-making technologies that transformed visual culture in the nineteenth century. Trained in the conventions of French academic art, he possessed the skills of a practiced draughtsman before turning his ...