The French episcopacy

In the early 1860s, Disdéri hit upon a moneymaking scheme which enabled him to profit a second time from the sale of celebrity portraits he had already taken and previously sold as individual cartes. By cropping the photographs into an oval format, grouping them together according to a particular theme and rephotographing the composition, he exploited the photographs anew and enabled his customers to buy seven, eight, thirteen twenty-three, or more portraits for the price of one. These cartes proved to be a popular novelty in market that was fast becoming saturated.

This particular example has an ecclesiastical theme. Somewhat inaccurately it is titled ‘Episcopat’ in the negative but in fact it shows a wider range of church figures than only bishops. At the apex of the composition appears Cardinal Bonald, the Archbishop of Lyons, and at the centre of the group in the large oval at the base of the composition appears Monsignor Dupanloup, Bishop of Orléans, surrounded by the professors of the seminary at la Chapelle de St Mesmin. Pope Pius IX is prominently featured in the largest of the oval medallions; the papal nuncio, Monsignor Chigi, appears to his lower right and, below him, Monsignor Bauer, the Empress Eugénie's confessor. 

Another, smaller medallion appears outside the arrangement of ecclesiastical portraits, this one in the lower right-hand corner of the print; it shows the photographer himself.