amille Silvy (1834-1910) was one of the stars of the second wave of pioneer photographers. The first wave included the rival inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1831), who announced the new medium to the world in 1839. If the 1840s represented an age of photographic experimentation and the first miraculous but often stiff and sometimes cadaverous-looking portraits, the 1850s saw broader professionalisation and an increasingly natural-looking portraiture. A key date was 1859, when a great World's Fair in Paris showed off photography to large new audiences. Among the highlights were photograplis of actors and actresses. Suddenly, fans could see authentic, close-up pictures of their heroes and heroines. Silvy was then twenty-one vears old. Although he was working for the French diplomatic service, two years later he took up photography and the following vear emerged as a major talent. In 1859 he moved from Paris to London and opened a portrait studio, It soon became the talk of the town. Silvy rode the crest of a new craze, which began in Paris that year, swept over the English Channel and sped across the Atlantic.
The new fashion was for albums of carte-de-visite (visiting card) portrait photographs.... [Haworth-Booth, Preface]
Copies of almost all the portraits are neatly pasted in with the client’s name, the date taken and the negative number, thus providing a unique record of a studio! After the carte-de- visite boom in the mid- 1860s, business tailed off and by 1869 Silvy had closed his studio and returned to France. Strangely and sadly, most of his later life remains a mystery and there is no trace of him after 1871, when he was reported to be recovering from injuries received in the bombardment of Asniéres, a suburb of Paris, during the Franco- Prussian War. [Briggs 163]
Works
- Nathaniel Mayer ('Natty') de Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild
- Mary Drew née Gladstone
- Isaac Williams
- Sir John Kelk
- Aina (Sarah Forbes Bonetta (later Davies)
- Louis William Desanges
Bibliography
Briggs, Asa. A Victorian Portrait: Victorian Life and Values as Seen through the Work of Studio Photographers. London: Cassell, 1989.
Haworth-Booth, Mark. Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2010.
Created 24 June 2020
Last modfied 27 August 2024