Mosaique: The Imperial Court of Napoleon III (c. 1866): Art, History and Details

Mosaique: The Imperial Court of Napoleon III (c. 1866) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819–1889).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The mosaic cards offered visual catalogues of the luminaries of a profession or social group in a single photograph. Here the emperor, his wife, and son top a pyramid of statesmen, soldiers, artists, writers, and others affiliated with the imperial court. This image was produced by cutting hundreds of figures photographed by Disdéri away from their backgrounds, mounting the likenesses on a single sheet, photographing that collage, and printing it on 6 x 9 cm cards.

Object facts

• Title: Mosaique: The Imperial Court of Napoleon III
• Date: c. 1866
• Creator attribution: André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819–1889)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print, montage carte-de-visite
• Dimensions: Image: 9.1 x 5.6 cm (3 9/16 x 2 3/16 in.); Paper: 9.1 x 5.6 cm (3 9/16 x 2 3/16 in.); Mounted: 10.5 x 6.1 cm (4 1/8 x 2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2019.69

A detail from the museum

Disdéri bragged that the mosaique could offer a picture of “from two or three persons up to a thousand for the same price” as a photograph of one individual.

Collection credit

Gift of Barbara Tannenbaum and Mark Soppeland

Further reading listed by the museum

• Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985
• Hannavy, John. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. New York: Routledge, 2008.
• Fineman, Mia. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.