Madame Alice Silvy and Marcel Monnier
(1839-1913 and 1853-1918)

[This portrait of Silvy's wife and her younger brother does not appear in the Silvy daybooks, so was probably taken during the period covered by the missing daybook, July 1863 to June 1864.]

Silvy was a bachelor when he first came to London but he met Marie-Louise-Elisabeth-Lucie-Alice Monnier at a costume ball in Paris on 12 March 1863 and they got married three months later. She was the daughter of Alexandre Monnier, a historian, whose circle of friends included Victor Hugo, Louis Boulanger and Gustave Courbet (Mark Haworth-Booth, River Scene, France, 1992). Their marriage produced a daughter in 1866 and a son two years later. 

The boy in this portrait is Alice Silvy's younger brother, Marcel Monnier, who was later a photographer and an explorer.

Known as ‘Bébé’ [English: Baby] within the family, Jean-Marie-Albert-Marcel Monnier was raised by his older sister Alice after the early death of their mother. He became a correspondent for the French daily newspaper Le Temps. He travelled to Mexico, San Francisco and Hawaii, where he photographed the volcano Kilauea. In 1892 he accompanied his friend Louis-Gustave Binger, the noted explorer of West Africa, on a mission to chart the frontiers of the Côte d’Ivoire and subsequently published an account of the journey, which he illustrated with many of his own photographs. Later works recounted his voyages in South America, where he crossed the continent from coast to coast, and his travels in Asia. He died at Jeurre, near the Swiss border, on 18 September 1918.