Portret van Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury after 1830

This is Georg Wolf’s portrait of Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury, made sometime in the mid-19th century. It is a print, meaning that an image was incised on a metal plate, inked, and then transferred to paper. Looking closely, you can see the fineness of the lines, which create a subtle tonal range and capture the likeness of the sitter. A print like this, in its time, would have circulated widely – a relatively inexpensive way to acquire a portrait. In a sense, that reproductive quality is the point; printmaking was an essential technology in the rise of mass media, and the democratization of images. While we tend to think of “original” art as unique, this kind of image played an important role in shaping visual culture. This was not a high art but a crafted one. It reflects the transformation of an artisan trade into industrial production.