Bertall
Charles Albert d'Arnoux (Charles Constant Albert Nicolas, Vicomte d'Arnoux, Count of Limoges-Saint-Saëns), known as Bertall (or Bertal, an anagram of Albert) or Tortu-Goth (December 18, 1820 in Paris - March 24, 1882 in Soyons) was a French illustrator, engraver, caricaturist, and early photographer.
Biography
His father was a former war commissioner. His family wanted him to study at the Ecole Polytechnique, but he chose to study painting, and spent several years in the studio of Michel Martin Drolling, at the end of which he decided to devote himself exclusively to illustration and caricature. On the advice of Balzac, who mentored him, he began signing his works under the name of Bertall, an adjusted anagram of his middle name. He married Albertine Cesarine Elisabeth Pellapra de Lolle and became the father of triplets on 17 August 1866. He was made Knight of the Legion of Honor on February 3, 1875.
He drew for Le Magasin pittoresque (fr), Musée des familles, La Semaine des enfants, Le Journal pour tous, La Bibliothèque des chemins de fer, and the Bibliothèque rose (fr). He provided 3,600 drawings for Les Romans populaires illustrés, published in 30 volumes by Gustave Barba between 1849 and 1855. He contributed numerous cartoons and comics to L'Illustration and La Semaine, the Journal pour rire (fr) and Le Grelot (fr). He also wrote and illustrated his own texts, including La Comédie de notre temps and La Vigne, voyage autour des vins de France.
A pioneer in photography, he collaborated with Hippolyte Bayard in 1855, then opened the Bayard and Bertall photography workshop (15 bis rue de la Madeleine, Paris) in the early 1860s until 1866. He started his own successful portraiture studio in 1866.
His Les Communeux, 1871. Types, caractères, costumes, was interpreted by scholar Michael Dorsch as "play[ing] into the public anxiety over the destructive force of the Commune through the depiction of established social norms thrown helter-skelter." Bertall claims a lack of political bias, owing to the fact that his drawings were based on his own eye-witness experience, but Dorsch assesses the book as decidedly propagandistic, associating Communards with violence and criminality. An 1873 version of the text was published with the English title The Communists of Paris 1871: Types, Physiognomies, Characters and accompanying English-language explanatory text, presumably to win support for the French monarchist position among British readers. Of particular interest to Bertall was depicting the Communard women's subversion of Second Empire gender norms, and Communard men's failure to live up to them.
Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024
