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| Charles Reutlinger Portrait of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1860s albumen carte-de-visite National Portrait Gallery, London |
Charles Reutlinger (1816-1880) founded a photo studio in Paris. It operated from 1850 to 1937, specializing in portraits of "the actors, artists, musicians, composers, opera singers, and ballet dancers of the period." Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the transcendentally gifted French painter, was born in 1780. His adolescence coincided with the long playing-out of the French Revolution. His old age coincided with the American Civil War, and he died in 1867, having nearly reached the age of ninety. Fortunately for posterity, the Reutlinger studio was on hand to manufacture a photographic likeness of the great Ingres in his final years. Garanti d'après nature reads the text printed along the bottom margin of the mount – Guaranteed faithful to nature or more literally Guaranteed to be 'after' nature – and what was this quaint phrase intended to mean? Many of Julia Margaret Cameron's portraits of similar date are mounted on cards with the similar inscription, From Life. It sounds as if in the 1860s people could still perceive something uniquely strange about photographs. That strangeness has never altered, but has over time become commonplace and no longer obtrusive.
Roland Barthes classically explains why – "Photography's Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography." (from La Chambre Claire, published in 1980, translated by Richard Howard and published in English as Camera Lucida in 1981)
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study of Winged Amor for Golden Age mural ca. 1862 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study of Winged Amor for Golden Age mural ca. 1862 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study for St Symphorien ca. 1834 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Figure studies ca. 1815-19 drawing British Museum (formerly owned by Edgar Degas) |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Figure studies 1812 drawing British Museum (formerly owned by Edgar Degas) |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study for Pindar ca. 1826-27 drawing British Museum (formerly owned by Edgar Degas) |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study for Pindar ca. 1826-27 drawing British Museum (formerly owned by Edgar Degas) |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study of Nymph for Golden Age mural ca. 1862 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study of figure group for Golden Age mural ca. 1862 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study for Joan of Arc ca. 1866 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Study for L'Odalisque à l'esclave 1839 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Sir John Hay & his sister Mary Hay in Rome 1816 drawing British Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Madame Guillaume Guillon Lethière & Son 1808 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art (gift of Louisine Havemeyer) |