Mosaique: The Imperial Court of Napoleon III
1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1866
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Mosaique: The Imperial Court of Napoleon III is a 1866 by André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a tiny photo packed with hundreds of small faces—Napoleon III, his wife, and son at the top, then rows of generals, writers, and artists below. Disdéri didn’t just take one photo. He cut out individual portraits, glued them onto a single sheet, then photographed the whole collage again. These cards were like 19th-century trading cards, sold to the public as collectibles. If you like this idea of mixing photos like a puzzle, look up impasto.
The mosaic cards offered visual catalogues of the luminaries of a profession or social group in a single photograph. Here the emperor, his wife, and son top a pyramid of statesmen, soldiers, artists, writers, and others affiliated with the imperial court. This image was produced by cutting hundreds of figures photographed by Disdéri away from their backgrounds, mounting the likenesses on a single sheet, photographing that collage, and printing it on 6 x 9 cm cards.
Disdéri bragged that the mosaique could offer a picture of “from two or three persons up to a thousand for the same price” as a photograph of one individual.
Read the full account in the museum source.
André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (1819–1889) was a French artist.
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