NPG Camille Silvy carte-de-visites

A unique collection of carte-de-visite images of sitters from twelve albums representing the output of Camille Silvy’s (1834-1910) photographic portrait studio based at 38 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, London between 1860 - July 1866. 

 

Cartomania

In the 1860s, the rise of affordable photography created a world wide craze for collecting and exchanging portrait photographs called cartes-de-visite. Suddenly the novelty of a small albumen photographic likeness mounted onto a standard 2.5 by 4 inch card was accessible to the middle classes and acted as the Victorian equivalent of social media. 

People eagerly displayed and collected cards and traded them with friends, family, and acquaintances. Celebrities from reigning queens, politicians, literary figures and actors as well as notorious criminals were very popular. 

At its peak in the 1860s, hundreds of millions of cartes were sold every year in England alone.

 

Camile Silvy

One of the most original and fashionable photographers of the Nineteenth Century, Camille Silvy transformed portrait photography from an art into an industry.

During the nine years that he operated a studio in London’s Bayswater, he photographed some 17,000 sitters in the popular carte-de-visite format. A significant number of his initial clients were member’s of society’s upper crust, but the princes and the dukes were slowly replaced by colliery owners and northern manufacturers. We know this because the studio’s daybooks have survived, a series of ledgers into which one portrait from each sitting was pasted, under a unique negative number, together with the sitter’s name and, from Volume 2 onwards, the date of the sitting.

Today they offer us a fascinating record of a popular London studio’s output at the height of 'Cartomania'.

Compiled by the studio, each album is arranged almost entirely chronologically and in sitter number order. Each page is divided into a grid of four sections with each section featuring one carte-de-visite sized albumen print from the sittings, pasted beneath the sitter number and a handwritten identification of the photograph’s subject and dates.

 

Authentic portraits from the beginnings of photography

This set allows comparison of thousands of carte-de-visite images made on an industrial scale at the height of 'Cartomania' and the new phenomenon of mass studio portraiture mostly depicting fashionable society in contemporary dress. 

Associated metadata identifies dates and sitters where known and keywords help locate themes, poses, fashions, hairstyles, expressions etc

The set is suitable for licensing, scholarly uses and AI training.

 

About Us

The National Portrait Gallery holds the most extensive and prestigious collection of portraits in the world, with over 350,000 works. The collection focuses on the men and women who have made - and are making - Britain what is it today.