Portraiture
In the 19th century, rare were the artists who did not at some point indulge in portrait painting, which, like landscapes, was regaining favour. The proliferation of portraiture seems to have sprung more from an ostentatious desire to celebrate self-image that would play an eminently social role, rather than from personal introspection. Furthermore, portraiture constituted a source of regular income; it was favoured by artists such as Ricard and Benjamin-Constant who made it into a speciality.
The advent of photography in 1840 profoundly changed this art form, which evolved alongside the former despite half a century of an often stormy relationship between photography and painting. Right up until the end of the century, a bourgeois and fashionable clientele remained faithful to the painted portrait. In the fashion of Bonnat and Carolus-Duran, the painters Debat-Ponsan, Pichon, Esbens and Fabre left works that exuded an official and sometimes pompous appearance imbued with Ingres-like or David-like airs.
Parallel to this concept, which exalts the values of the dominant class, a tendency began that reflected the efforts towards realism: beggars, the aged and peasants were now worthy subjects of portraiture in which psychological comment, sometimes bleak and ruthless, dominated over the ostentation of "la grande bourgeoisie" (see Charpentier, Severac or Rixens).
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