Bayard’s Boutique

Abstract

This essay pursues a close reading of Hippolyte Bayard’s Boutique d’épicier (1843), a photographic depiction of a Parisian shopfront that combines still life, street scene, and stratified social portrait. Interpreting this early specimen of negative-positive photography as a self-reflexive picture, the author explores rich analogies between photographs and vitrines (cabinets of curiosity, shopwindows), photographers and grocers (traffickers of exotic goods, philistines, chemical agents). Other considerations include the changeable nature of tastes, patterns of metropolitan consumption, and comparisons between Bayard’s composition, photographs by Henry Talbot, and caricatures of the grocer by Honoré Daumier, Charles-Joseph Traviès, and Honoré de Balzac.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The positive print is discussed in Jean-Claude Gautrand and Michel Frizot, Hippolyte Bayard: Naissance de l’image photographique (Amiens: Trois Cailloux, 1986), 40, 93. It is reproduced without discussion in André Jammes, Hippolyte Bayard: Ein verkannter Erfinder und Meister der Photographie (Lucerne: C. J. Bucher, 1975), plate 46; and Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 77.

2 Michel Frizot, “Bayard en son jardin: Variations sans thème,” in Gautrand and Frizot, Hippolyte Bayard, 77–105; Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 157–73; and Nancy B. Keeler, “Cultivating Photography: Hippolyte Bayard and the Development of a New Art” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1991), 150–71.

3 On Le Noyé, see Jillian Lerner, Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography (New York: Routledge, 2021), 10–31; Batchen, Burning with Desire, 157–73; Michel Poivert, “Bayard en Noyé: Un mort vivant à l’origine de la photographie”; Margit Rosen, “Mourir pour l’image: Hippolyte Bayard en autoportrait comme Noyé”; Amélie Lavin, “Hippolyte Bayard et la question du jeu: Humour noir et simulacre,” in Hippolyte Bayard: Chevalier de l’ombre (Breteuil-sur-Noye: Société historique de Breteuil-sur-Noye, 2005), 85–97, 99–110, 111–25; Effie Komninou, “Hippolyte Bayard’s Le Noyé: A Little Meditation on Death,” Third Text 17, no. 2 (2003): 163–70; and Michel Sapir, “The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man,” Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 3 (1994): 619–29.

4 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

5 On Bayard’s early work, see Gautrand and Frizot, Hippolyte Bayard; Keeler, “Cultivating Photography”; Michel Frizot, “The Parole of the Primitives: Hippolyte Bayard and the French Calotypists,” History of Photography 16, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 358–70; and Nancy Keeler, “Souvenirs of the Invention of Photography on Paper: Bayard, Talbot, and the Triumph of Negative-Positive Photography,” in Photography: Discovery and Invention, ed. Weston Naef (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), 47–62.

6 André Jammes writes: Bayard was “one of the first and best French Daguerreotypists . . . [and] the first French ‘Calotypist.’” Jammes, Hippolyte Bayard, 17.

7 Nancy Keeler, “Hippolyte Bayard aux origines de la photographie et de la ville moderne,” La Recherche Photographique, no. 2 (May 1987): 6–17.

8 Gautrand provides the 1842 date and exposure time, grouping Boutique with Bayard’s first results with the negative-positive process. Gautrand and Frizot, Hippolyte Bayard, 40. A date of August 1843 is written on the margin of the negative. The handwriting is not consistent with samples of Bayard’s penmanship analyzed by Carolyn Peters, curatorial assistant at the J. Paul Getty Museum (email to the author, May 2022). The item illustrated in Fig. 3 is described as a “negative on waxed paper” in the collection data of the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/00160006643. However, Thierry Laps, scientific assistant at that institution, determined the paper is not waxed (email to the author, July 2021).

9 Bayard lived in the Batignolles neighborhood and worked near the Tuileries, both on the west end of the grands boulevards; rue Meslay is farther east. I have found records for “Romero, Meslay, 18” under “épiciers en detail” in Annuaire général du commerce (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1847, 424); and “Romero fils, épicier, Meslay, 16” in Almanach-Bottin du commerce de Paris, January 1, 1854, 415 (Paris: Bureau de l’Almanach du commerce). I have not found a listing for a grocer named Romero prior to 1847, and the Almanach-Bottin for January 1, 1842, 261, lists a “Louzier, épicier, Meslay, 18.” Perhaps Romero took over an existing grocery shop on rue Meslay sometime after January 1842 and was newly installed there when Bayard’s negative was made in 1842 or 1843.

10 Frizot conceives this visual program as grammar (parole) or musical refrain (variations). Frizot, “Parole of the Primitives,” 358–70; and Frizot, “Bayard en son jardin,” 77–105.

11 There are three versions of Le Noyé. In Fig. 2 I reproduce the one in which this vase and other accessories are most legible (not the version bearing Bayard’s note on the verso). On these clues in relation to Bayard’s performative, fictional suicide, see Lerner, Experimental Self-Portraits, 10–31.

12 Frizot, “Bayard en son jardin,” 93.

13 Bayard often posed in a waistcoat with checkered fabric, here displaced to a worker’s trousers. See Figs. 7 and 8; and Jammes, Hippolyte Bayard, plates 25, 26, 33, 60.

14 Reproduced in Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 436.

15 See the collection of Bayard’s works at the Société française de photographie (SFP), https://sfp.asso.fr/photographie/index.php?/category/bayard-hippolyte-2.

16 Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 201–2.

17 The image I refer to is La petite bodeuse, 1840–49, paper negative, SFP, https://sfp.asso.fr/photographie/picture.php?/8392/category/bayard-hippolyte-2.

18 The SFP has a handcolored print of this composition, revealing elements Bayard deemed important: a brick wall as backdrop, flasks of photographic chemicals, the porcelain vase, a crated cherub reaching out to the viewer, the bench Bayard posed on in Le Noyé. See Intérieur de grenier, 1840–49, SFP, https://sfp.asso.fr/photographie/picture.php?/8923/category/bayard-hippolyte-2.

19 On Bayard’s self-presentation as garden worker and “cultivator of the new medium of photography,” see Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 163–93, quote on 165.

20 Geoffrey Batchen, “An Almost Unlimited Variety: Photography and Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, ed. Roxana Marcoci, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 20–26.

21 Carol Armstrong, “A Scene in a Library: An Unsolved Mystery,” History of Photography 26, no. 2 (2002): 90–99; and Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 125–30, 138–44.

22 Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 107–78.

23 Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844), 19–20.

24 Echoing Jean-Baptiste Biot’s January 1839 speech, Talbot compared the sensitive paper in the camera to the retina, imagining that these receptive surfaces register precognitive optical impressions. See “Jean-Baptiste Biot: [Additional Comments] (January 7, 1839),” in First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography, ed. Steffen Siegal (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), 47.

25 See Geoffrey Batchen, “A Philosophical Window,” History of Photography 26, no. 2 (2002): 100–112; and Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 107–78. On Le Noyé, see the sources in note 3.

26 On the possibility that all Talbot’s pictures have “metaphorical meanings,” see Batchen, “A Philosophical Window,” 100.

27 Batchen, Burning with Desire, 106–49; Batchen, “A Philosophical Window”; and Karen Hellman, The Window in Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013).

28 Batchen, “A Philosophical Window.”

29 Ibid., 102–3; and Anne McCauley, “Talbot’s Rouen Window: Romanticism, Naturphilosophie and the Invention of Photography,” History of Photography 26, no. 2 (2002): 124–31.

30 See Carla Gottlieb, The Window in Art: From the Window of God to the Vanity of Man (New York: Abaris Books, 1981); and Lorenz Eitner, “The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism,” Art Bulletin 37, no. 4 (1955): 281–90.

31 Talbot’s mother made a similar connection, summoning shopping, fashion, and female desire when she appended the title The Millner’s Window to one of Talbot’s shelf pictures. See Batchen, “A Philosophical Window,” 105–6; and Armstrong, “Scene in a Library,” 93–95.

32 On links between window-shopping and visual media, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

33 See Natacha Coquery, ed., La Boutique et la ville: Commerces, commerçants, espaces et clientèles, XVIe–XXe siècle (Tours: Université François Rabelais, 2000); Michael Winstanley, The Shopkeeper’s World, 1830–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Stephen Potyondi, “The Discovery of the Street: Urbanism, Gentrification, and Cultural Change in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris” (master’s thesis, University of Alberta, 2011); and Ralph Kingston, “Capitalism in the Streets: Paris Shopkeepers, Passages Couverts, and the Production of the Early Nineteenth-Century City,” Radical History Review 114 (Fall 2012): 39–65.

34 “Romero, eau-de-vie, Vieille-Bouclerie, 5” appears in Almanach du commerce de Paris, January 1, 1838, 308; and Almanach général des commerçants de Paris et des départements, January 1, 1841, 353. Almanach-Bottin, “Vins en Gros-Paris,” January 1, 1842, 380, lists: “Romero, vins fins et ordinaires, eau-de-vie, liqueurs, sirops et comestibles d’Espagne, représentant la maison Carriga de Cadiz pour les vins de Xéres, r. de la Ferme, 36.” Almanach-Bottin, January 1, 1854, 415, still lists Romero vending “vins fins d’Espagne” at 36 rue de la Ferme.

35 Wholesale grocers were the barons of the trade, supplying goods and credit to retailers. In 1846 there were 1,649 retail groceries in Paris, mostly small businesses. The retail trade was precarious and unlikely to lead to enrichment; only 20 percent of grocers earned enough to qualify as electors, and few passed their business to sons or assistants. Alain Faure, “The Grocery Trade in Nineteenth-Century Paris: A Fragmented Corporation,” in Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. G. Crossick and H. G. Haupt (London: Methuen, 1984), 155–94.

36 See, for example, the trade card of “R. Brunsden, tea dealer, grocer, and oilman at the Three Golden Sugar Loaves in St. James Street,” ca. 1750, etching, British Museum, London, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_Heal-68-45.

37 Geoffrey Batchen, Negative/Positive: A History of Photography (London: Routledge, 2021), 1–20.

38 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 2010).

39 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

40 Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, “Sans-culottes, sans café, sans tabac: Shifting Realms of Necessity and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 37–62.

41 Pierre Bourdieu, “Taste of Luxury, Taste of Necessity,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 72–78.

42 See Michael Paul Driskel, “The Proletarian’s Body: Charlet’s Representations of Social Class during the July Monarchy,” in The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58–89.

43 Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–

1800, transl. Brian Pearce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 221.

44 Faure, “Grocery Trade,” 158.

45 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Équilibre,” chap. 146 in Tableau de Paris, vol. 2 (Paris, 1783), 81.

46 Quote from Honoré de Balzac, “L’épicier,” Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Curmer, 1840), 2. On bourgeois taste, see Anne O’Neil-Henry, “Paul de Kock and the Marketplace of Culture,” French Forum 39, no. 2 (Spring/Fall 2014): 97–112; and Jennifer Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830–1848,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 2 (May 2006): 221–48.

47 Gretchen van Slyke, “Les épiciers au musée: Baudelaire et l’artiste bourgeois,” Romantisme, no. 55 (1987): 55–66.

48 Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 83–89.

49 Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, Paris Anecdote (Paris: Delahays, 1845), 187–88.

50 Pierre Larousse, “Épicier,” in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. 7 (Paris, 1870), 696.

51 Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 161–92.

52 Balzac’s treatise on stimulants was an appendix in a new edition of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (Paris: Charpentier, 1839). See Kassy Hayden, “Honoré de Balzac’s Treatise on Modern Stimulants: An Annotated Translation” (master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2018); and Philippe Dubois, “Savarin/BalZac: Du goût des excitants sur l’écriture moderne,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33, no. 1/2 (Fall/Winter 2004–5): 75–88.

53 Hayden, “Balzac’s Treatise,” 63.

54 Balzac, “L’épicier,” 1–2. Balzac’s essay was published in La Silhouette in 1830, then revised and published in 1839 as the first installment of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. The editor commissioned a full-page illustration by Paul Gavarni to accompany Balzac’s text. See Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–50 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 94–103; and Jillian Lerner, Graphic Culture: Illustration and Artistic Enterprise in Paris, 1830–1848 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018), 69–98.

55 Balzac, “L’épicier,” 2.

56 Fabrice Erre, Le règne de la Poire: Caricatures de l’esprit bourgeois de Louis-Philippe à nos jours (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2011), 19–40.

57 Balzac, “L’épicier,” 3–4.

58 Sarah Maza writes: “The problem embodied by a bourgeois character like [Balzac’s] Crevel is not that he enjoys an unfair surplus of wealth, but that he is unable to perform the alchemy whereby money is redeemed in service of higher ideals such as passion or art. The bourgeois’s money merely reproduces itself endlessly, stuck in the realm of matter . . . [and] mechanical reproduction.” Maza, Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 186.

59 On disparagements of photography as a mimetic mechanical process, threatening or inferior to painting, see Anne McCauley, “François Arago and the Politics of the French Invention of Photography,” in Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography, 1983–1989, ed. Daniel Younger (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 59–61.

60 See Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019); and Kevin Coleman and Daniel James, eds., Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction (London: Verso, 2021).

61 McCauley, Industrial Madness, 11–102.

62 An exceptional portrait studio making calotypes from 1843–47 was that of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in Edinburgh. Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé, eds., A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 25–27.

63 Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 251–64.

64 Keeler, “Hippolyte Bayard aux origines,” 9.

65 Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 68–71.

66 Ibid.

67 Larry Schaaf, “25 January 1839: ‘Dame Nature Has Become His Drawing Mistress,’” The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné (blog), January 29, 2016, https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2016/01/29/25-january-1839-dame-nature-has-become-his-drawing-mistress/.

68 Larry Schaaf, “Henry Onstage, Chartists in the Streets and Daguerre in the Wings: Birmingham, August 1839,” The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné (blog), January 20, 2017, https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2017/01/20/henry-onstage-chartists-in-the-streets-daguerre-in-the-wings-birmingham-august-1839/.

69 On popular science and “amusing physics,” see Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 190–226.

70 “Rapport sur les dessins produits par le procédé de M. Bayard. Séance de l’Académie royale des beaux-arts, 2 November 1839,” Le Moniteur universel, November 13, 1839, 2009–10. See Gautrand and Frizot, Hippolyte Bayard, 25–29, 193–95; or the English translation in Siegal, First Exposures, 146–54.

71 The first photographic albums of travel pictures published in the 1840s contained engravings drawn by artists who consulted daguerreotypes as preparatory sketches. Lemagny and Rouillé, History of Photography, 26; and Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 107–15.

72 Armstrong, Scenes in a Library, 107–78.

73 Geoffrey Batchen, “The Labor of Photography,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 1 (2009): 292–96.

74 Ibid., 294.

75 Nancy Keeler, “Inventors and Entrepreneurs,” History of Photography 26, no. 1 (2002): 30.

76 Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 230–38.

77 James Cuno, “Charles Philipon, La Maison Aubert, and the Business of Caricature in Paris, 1829–41,” Art Journal 43, no. 4 (1983): 347–54.

78 Lerner, Graphic Culture, 69–98.

79 Larry Schaaf, “Henry in Paris, no. 1,” The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné (blog), January 13, 2017, https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2017/01/13/henry-in-paris-no-1/.

80 See Larry Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

81 Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 57–63, 140, 307.

82 Ibid., 101–7.

83 Keeler, “Hippolyte Bayard aux origines,” 8–10; and Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 61–67, 79–85, 96–97, 119–20.

84 Keeler, “Cultivating Photography,” 128–41.

85 Ibid., 101–5; and Carolyn Peter, “The Many Lives of the Getty Bayard Album,” Getty Research Journal, no. 15 (2022): 67–86.

86 Keeler, “Inventors and Entrepreneurs,” 26–33; and Édouard de Saint-Ours, “Finding Talbot’s Calotype School in 1843 Paris,” The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné (blog), May 18, 2018, https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2018/05/18/doing-the-django-to-find-talbots-calotype-school-in-1843-paris/.

87 Schaaf, “Henry in Paris, no. 1.”

88 Dale Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World-Economy, 1830–1848 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Kenneth Kelly, “Sugar Plantations in the French West Indies: Archeological Perspectives from Guadeloupe and Martinique,” in Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New World, ed. Elizabeth Scott (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 218–39.

89 France abolished slavery in 1794; Napoleon restored it in 1802. A change of regime in 1830 brought renewed commitment to abolition, but emancipation in the colonies was not secured until 1848. See Alan Forrest, The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 233–49.

90 See three chapters in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, all written by an author identified only as “Roseval”: “Le Créole des Antilles” (white settlers “convinced of a primordial right of exploitation over all skin black or copper,” 288); “Le Mûlatre” (citizens of mixed blood, emancipated in 1833); and “Le Nègre” (a French social type who may “appear to many readers a bizarre intrusion [in this portrait of French society], a displaced shadow that stains,” 307). Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle. Province, vol. 3 (Paris: Curmer, 1842), 284–95; 296–306; 307–28.

91 Jillian Lerner, “Construction Worker, Paris,” in Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography, ed. Karen Hellman, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, forthcoming).

92 See Potyondi, “Discovery of the Street.”

93 See Roche, A History of Everyday Things.

94 See Allan Sekula, “An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” Grey Room, no. 55 (Spring 2014): 16–27.

95 See Margaret Cohen, “Panoramic Literature and the Invention of Everyday Genres,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 227–52.

96 Lerner, Graphic Culture, 69–98.

97 André Rouillé, “Les images photographiques du monde du travail sous le Second Empire,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 54 (September 1984): 31–43.

98 See Cuno, “Charles Philipon”; and Andrew McLellan, “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (September 1996): 439–53.

99 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 210.

100 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.

101 See Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (London: Verso, 2022); and Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

102 See Larry Schaaf, “To the Calotype: Happy 175th Birthday,” The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné (blog), September 25, 2015, https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/2015/09/25/to-the-calotype-happy-175th-birthday/.

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Jillian Lerner

JILLIAN LERNER is assistant professor of art history at the University of British Columbia. Along with articles in Grey Room, History of Photography, and Oxford Art Journal, she has published two books: Graphic Culture: Illustration and Artistic Enterprise in Paris, 1830–1848 and Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography [Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, 6333 Memorial Road, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z2, Canada, [email protected]].