Portret van de schilder Gustave Louis Marie Pieron, ten voeten uit 1861

Curator: This striking photograph, a gelatin-silver print, captures the full-length likeness of the painter Gustave Louis Marie Pieron. Joseph Dupont created it in 1861. The attire of the time is wonderful! Editor: Well, he certainly commits to those trousers. It’s such a stiff composition but the checkerboard pattern and the flowing line of the overcoat adds a needed vitality. Do you think that juxtaposition was intentional? Curator: It hints at the transitional state of portraiture at the time. Photography, relatively new, imitated painting but its inherent realism disrupted the artifice of traditional portraiture. The props here —the chair, the patterned rug— contribute to a sense of carefully constructed presentation. Editor: You know, when I look closer, he does have a sort of self-satisfied, ‘look at me’ air. His pose, with a hand on the hip, seems to declare “artist in command." It’s a little comical actually. Almost performative in its deliberate assertion of status, isn't it? I am curious about the absence of painting attributes... where's the palette? Where is the brush? Curator: It's intriguing. It certainly pushes toward the psychological more than a purely representational function. Perhaps Dupont, and Pieron, were making a subtle statement about the evolving role of the artist. Painting needed no longer be a visual language, it needed instead to engage ideas about self. Editor: He definitely comes off like he has many ideas about the self, and wants everyone else to know it, too! It's such an artifact, so firmly rooted in its time yet strangely contemporary, like a nineteenth-century meme somehow. It gives us a good laugh. Curator: Indeed. Dupont captured not just an image but a complex social performance that transcends time, and maybe an implicit cultural attitude. It shows an intriguing sliver of the past. Editor: Well, next time I dress up I know the stance I will choose, hand on hip for the ages!