Portret van de dochter van Victor-Charles Mahillon 1897

Auguste Danse made this portrait of Victor-Charles Mahillon's daughter with etching in the late 19th century. It's interesting to consider this work in the context of the rise of photography and mass media. Etching had long been a popular method for reproducing images, but how did it fare when photography became more widespread? Perhaps this piece speaks to the staying power of hand-made art objects in an age of mechanical reproduction, especially within a bourgeois culture. It is worth remembering that the labour of the artist in the creation of an artwork has social value, and this portrait, in its fine detail, displays the skill of the artist. To find out more, one could investigate 19th-century Belgian printmaking and how artists negotiated the changing image landscape and their position within it.