Etienne Carjat

Etienne Carjat was born on 28 March 1828 in Fareins, in the Ain department of France. He attended the local communal school until 1838, after which his family moved to Paris, where he was apprenticed in industrial silk design at the Cartier silk factory and spent about three years, from 1841 to 1844, in that trade. He went on to work as a journalist and caricaturist in Paris, contributing satirical drawings to the illustrated press of the 1850s and 1860s.

In 1858 he learned photography under Pierre Petit and soon opened his own portrait studio. Over the following two decades he photographed many of the leading writers, artists, and public figures of his time, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Gustave Courbet. A number of his portraits were later reproduced as woodburytypes in the publication Galerie contemporaine beginning in 1876, which brought his images to a wider public. His photographic work earned him an honorable mention at the London International Exhibition of 1862, a medal at the Salon of 1863, and a bronze medal at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle.

Carjat died in Paris in March 1906. Sources agree on the year and city but disagree on the exact day, with reputable references variously giving 8 March, 9 March, 19 March, or 29 March 1906, and the Musee d'Orsay's own artist record giving only the year while noting uncertainty even about the precise place of death. Photographic material from his studio is held today at institutions including the Bibliotheque nationale de France, though the custodial history of any working archive between his death and its institutional acquisition is not fully documented.

In his own time, Carjat's photographic portraits were recognized through Salon medals and exhibition honors in the 1860s. His reputation rests today on the enduring visibility of specific sitters: the Baudelaire portrait held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rimbaud portrait of December 1871 are among the most frequently reproduced photographic images of nineteenth-century French literary figures, and both continue to anchor discussions of his work in museum and photography-history writing. Retrospective exhibitions at the Musee Nicephore Niepce (1980), the Musee Carnavalet (1982), and a Paris gallery (1990) reaffirmed his standing within the history of French photography and caricature, alongside better-known contemporaries such as Nadar.

Carjat's market is thin and specialized, consistent with a nineteenth-century photographer whose work is prized chiefly for its historical and iconographic value rather than traded as a benchmark blue-chip name. Current research did not surface a documented, verifiable all-time auction record for Carjat: no title, price, sale house, and sale date could be confirmed together from available sources, so none is published here. Secondary summaries report that two of his known original portraits of Arthur Rimbaud have sold at French auction for substantial sums, one for 191,000 French francs in 1998 and another for about EUR 81,000 including premium on 24 January 2003, though the auction house is not identified in the sources reporting these results. A photographic portrait of Victor Hugo realized EUR 1,080 including premium at Lempertz in Cologne. These figures come from secondary reporting rather than primary auction catalogues and should be read as reference points, not a confirmed record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Carjat, and no gallery or estate represents him, so provenance research benefits from cross-checking against institutional holdings, including the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Toledo Museum of Art. Because his most famous images have long been licensed for reproduction and are sold today as prints through platforms unconnected to any authenticating estate, collectors should distinguish carefully between vintage nineteenth-century prints and later reproductions. His public auction market is thin and no verified record price could be confirmed as of this profile's data date, so any single sale result, including the higher secondary-market figures reported for individual Rimbaud portraits, should be treated as an isolated data point rather than a trend.