A gallery of celebrities

The following paragraph is taken from Elizabeth Anne McCauley's A.A.E.Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (1985):

'Composite prints of oval portraits gradually yielded to the so-called mosaic carte de visite, in which hundreds of the figures photographed by Disdéri were cut out from their backdrops, mounted on a single sheet, and rephotographed. As he noted in his patent for the process on April 21, 1863, "The sale that I have made of contemporaries has invaded the entire world" so that now an engraving, lithograph or photograph could be combined to produce a collage which could "put on the market from two to three persons up to a thousand for the same price." The production of mosaic cartes featuring the legs of ballet dancers, opera stars, heads of state, the Bonaparte family, admirals of France, and so on, demonstrates the ingenuity of Disdéri's money-making schemes.'