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Victor Hugo, c.1870.
Image by National Media Museum
By the studio of Ghemar Freres, Brussels.
One of the most important French writers of the 19th century, Victor Hugo's (1802-1885) best known works include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Miserables (1862). Hugo's political ideas won him both acclaim and hostility - he fled France in 1851 due to his opposition to Napoleon. At his death in 1885 he was publicly celebrated, receiving burial in the Pantheon with great honours.
This portrait is called a carte-de-visite and was taken at the studio of Ghemar Freres, Brussels, in about 1870.A carte-de-visite is a photograph mounted on a piece of card the size of a formal visiting card of the 1850s. The format was introduced by the French photographer Andre-Adolphe-Eugene Disdéri (1819-1889) in 1854. The craze for collecting celebrity cartes-de-visite in albums reached its peak during the 1860s but the format remained popular until the beginning of the twentieth century.
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