1862Cartes de Visite.
Journal article
Google BooksHumphrey's Journal of the Daguerreotype and Photographic Arts and the Sciences and Arts Pertaining to Heliography, 1862, vol. 13, p. 326. Originally published in
The Art Journal.
Never was a nomenclature based upon the principle of
lucus a non lucendo exemplified in a more characteristic manner, than in the instance of the delightful photographic miniatures that now are universally popular under the title of
Cartes de Visite. They are neither regarded nor used as visiting cards, nor does anyone think of applying to them a plain English designation to that effect: and yet everybody understands a
Carte de Visite to be a small photographic portrait, generally a full length, by a prescient impulse that an artist more potent even than mounted on a card; and everybody is also equally anxious both to obtain his or her own miniature, executed in this style, and to form a collection of these
Carles de Visite—the portraits of everybody else. For the present, apparently, the most popular, the most deservedly popular also, and by far the most numerous to class of English portraits must be content to be known by inapplicable, and indeed an unmeaning French name : perhaps, in due time, the
carte de visite fashion of to-day may subside into what we certainly hope will prove to be an enduring admiration; for sun-miniatures-portraits, that is, of precisely the same order, but bearing a simple and becoming English title.
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