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French Painter Paul Delaroche was a bit premature when he exclaimed, on seeing his first photograph, "From today painting is dead!" All it did to Delaroche's contemporaries was put a lot of second-rate portrait painters out of business. Many promptly became portrait photographers, along with dozens of tinkerers, clerks and marginal entrepreneurs who sensed that with very little talent or capital a man might grow rich out of this provocative medium. In vain did the poet Lamartine dismiss photography as a "chance invention" that is "only a plagiarism of nature through a lens." Frenchmen, at least those who could afford to, had been paying up to 500 francs to have meticulous portraits done in oils. Now anyone could have as many likenesses of himself or his loved ones as he wanted, in short order and for only a few francs.
The show is full of faces, most of them unknown to history, that stare gravely at the magic box. Nobody has taught them to smile, it being unwise at the time to risk even that much motion for fear of blurring. The famous are equally grave. Ingres, photographed in dappled light at age 75, looks young and full of energy. Verlaine communes with his pernod in a café. Delacroix looks disapproving, a man with a face like a clenched fist who seems too tense ever to have dashed off those lovely, free-flowing watercolors in Morocco. Victor Hugo, in exile on the island of Guernsey for criticizing Napoleon III, poses against a neutral studio backdrop like some distinguished provincial doctor. Even revolutionary Painter Gustave Courbet is present, full length in one of the popular new photographic cartes de visites, in shirtsleeves and tamping down his pipe, his gnarled Jean Valjean face and butcher's forearms perfectly appropriate to the apostle of sweaty naturalism. The genius who invented the carte de visite, an Italian clothier's son who went by the name André-Adolphe-Eugene Disdéri, was soon turning out 2,000 prints a day at ten francs apiece. By 1861 Disdéri was justly celebrated as "the richest photographer in the world."
Early photography seems most wanting when it slavishly copies the conventions of painting — in still lifes and trompe l'oeil drapery. Painting requires an eye and a hand, photography only an eye. There is almost a labor theory of value that enhances a viewer's plea sure in a painted still life, a sense of awe at the painter's skill and patience in counterfeiting the frosty glaze of glass ware, the glow of an uncurling lemon peel. No photograph can induce the same feeling.