Description

Portrait of Émile Zola by Étienne Carjat for La Galerie Contemporainephotoglyphed and mounted on card.

John Grand-Carteret, in the introduction to his Zola in picturescites this portrait as one of Zola's most emblematic images: "there's the slimmer Zola; there's the Manet of 1868 which, as a cut of the face, is found in the Carjat of 1876, but with a less accentuated nose [...]"

A photo-mechanical reproduction and printing process, photoglyptie or woodburytypie (named after its inventor Walter Bentley Woodbury) is almost indistinguishable from silver halide printing; it costs much less and was a huge commercial success.
In the 1870s, the publisher Ludovic Baschet joined forces with the photographic establishments of Goupil & Cie to develop a process derived from photoglyphics and founded La Galerie contemporaine, which marketed portraits of the great men of the time at a price of 1.5 francs for an individual print. Between 1876 and 1878, these portraits were published in 5 folio volumes.
For this project, Baschet called on the most famous photographers of the time, including Nadar and Carjat.

A friend of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Étienne Carjat painted a famous portrait of Rimbaud. But the two men, members of the "Vilains Bonshommes" artistic group, fell out a year later when, following a quarrel, Rimbaud injured Carjat with a sword cane: in anger, Carjat erased the glass negatives of his portraits of the poet. In addition to his photograph of Zola, Carjat contributed a well-known photograph of Baudelaire and Dumas père to the Galerie Contemporaine.