Portret van Lodewijk Filips I, koning van Frankrijk

This is a portrait of Louis-Phillipe, King of France, made by Edouard Schuler using the intaglio printmaking technique. The image has been incised into a metal plate, likely copper, with fine lines, and then printed to paper. Look closely, and you can see the immense labor required to produce this image. The texture is a dense network of hatched lines, all carefully placed by the artist to produce the likeness and the tonal range. Before photography, this kind of print was the dominant medium for disseminating images. Its relatively easy to reproduce and distribute widely, and we can see it as a direct product of new modes of production and consumption. Intaglio became a crucial component in the machinery of modern celebrity, and indeed modern governance. It can be easy to overlook prints like this, but they should be understood as an industrious craft, and a critical technology in the 19th century.