The Madame B Album c. 1870s

Curator: Look at this—page 11 from "The Madame B Album," dating to around 1870, housed here at the Art Institute. Quite a curious creation, really. Editor: Curious is one word. Overwhelming comes to mind as well, in terms of sheer…activity. And the monochromatic tones are stark, but softened around the edges. Curator: It's a composite work, incorporating photography, printmaking—likely etching and engraving—along with colored pencil and ink. Apparently, the artist, Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier, produced it. You get a scene crowded with figures, seemingly plucked from history. Editor: Materially, the juxtaposition is interesting: highly reproducible prints alongside unique handmade embellishments like the crown at the top of the scene. I wonder how many iterations she made of the same scene? Mass production and individual crafting. Curator: Mass production filtered through individual sensibilities—precisely. This is academic art at its finest, filtered through the eye and the steady hand of an unusual maker. History painting refracted, transformed by Hennelle Fournier’s imagination and handiwork. Editor: And for whom? These albums signal an intimate labor. So different from paintings designed for the scale of museums and monuments of the time. How do we square an almost industrial approach to image making, with such obvious markers of intimacy? Was she working with a printmaker, or running a little workshop perhaps? Curator: A fascinating puzzle indeed, to place Fournier herself—perhaps a high society woman of her time — in relation to artistic circles that she engaged with. To consider this scene not simply as a "drawing", but rather, as you say, as the consequence of collective labor and personal artistry. And who “Madame B” actually was and what this album signifies? That's quite another puzzle to consider. Editor: Precisely. To re-frame the conversation around materials allows us to think differently about the presumed hierarchies of artistic labour at the time. That this was all stitched together so consciously begs a lot of questions about how to value images and the way people encounter them. Curator: Food for thought. "The Madame B Album" invites us to consider art’s social life, a unique vision, all carefully nestled within those sturdy covers. Editor: It certainly complicates simplistic assumptions around art's production and reception, and does so in such an unassuming, beguilingly "innocent" manner. Thank you, Madame B.