The Madame B Album c. 1870s

"The Madame B Album" is a photographic print on paper, made by Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier, a French artist who lived in the 19th century. This album page gives us an intimate glimpse into the world of bourgeois women in late 19th-century France. We see three oval portraits of women, framed by delicate, hand-painted flowers. Photography at this time was still a relatively new medium and was increasingly used by the middle classes for portraiture. Albums like this one became popular ways to display and share images of family and friends. Fournier was a woman working in a male-dominated field. It is interesting to speculate on how institutions such as the French Academy shaped the artistic training available to women at the time, and the kind of social networks that helped them develop their careers. Historians rely on sources such as census records, newspapers, and exhibition catalogs to reconstruct the social and institutional context of artworks like this one. By studying these kinds of materials, we can gain a deeper understanding of the artist, the subjects, and the social world that they inhabited.