Priére
1860s
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
7.3 x 10.5 cm. (2 7/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975
Accession Number
1975.548.32
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Priére** (Prayer), a delicate albumen silver print by Pierre-Louis Pierson from 1860s, captures a woman's serene profile in quiet devotion. Measuring just 7.3 x 10.5 cm, this intimate carte-de-visite format was a sensation in mid-19th-century Europe allowing affordable, collectible portraits that people exchanged like trading cards. Pierson, leading Parisian photographer of the Second Empire era, excelled in such refined studio portraits, often for high society. The albumen silver process, using egg whites to bind light-sensitive silver salts on glass negatives, produced the era's sharpest,...
About the Artist
Pierre-Louis Pierson · 1822–1913
Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822–1913) was a pioneering French portrait photographer whose career spanned the formative years of the medium. Born on December 13, 1822, in Hinckange in the Moselle department, Pierson developed an early fascination with photography during the 1840s, as the daguerreotype was still in its infancy. His early life and formal training remain sparsely documented, but by 1844, h...