Carte de Visite

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Or Visiting Cards to you and me. Popular from the 1860s they were mostly replaced by cabinet cards in the 1870s and onwards. CDVs were smaller than the later cabinet cards so could easily be given as visiting cards. They were cheap to produce, hence a person could have a photo taken in a studio and then have multiple reproductions made. There was a mania for collecting CDVs and albums were produced for collections to be stored.

Often the elaborate backs of CDVs can be more interesting than the photographs themselves.

Look past the girl and the dog and you can see that the chair has a jugenstil design and the reverse of the card is clearly influenced by art nouveau.

I’m not sure many of the CDV portraits did justice to their subjects. Many men in particular come out looking stern and rigid. (They had to stay very still for exposures so this goes some way to explaining why they come out the way they do).

CDVs were also used to illustrate national costumes and what were then referred to as “racial types,” a topic perhaps for another discussion. The Dutch lady at the head of this post is a good example of national costume.

[All these CDVs are from my personal collection]