Antique Cartes-De-Visite Photographs

Carte-de-visite, or CDV, is French for "visiting card" or calling card. That's because when a French daguerreotypist named André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented a method for exposing multiple negatives onto a single plate in 1854, the resulting 2 1/2- by 4-inch albumen prints were intended to replace conventional calling cards, which only displayed the bearer's name and other printed information. Disdéri's CDVs, which were made of thin paper mounted on card stock, included the bearer's formal portrait photographed in a studio. Cheaper than daguerreotypes, CDVs made photography accessible to the masses. In the United States, one of the first widespread applications of CDVs was for photos of soldiers fighting in the Civil War: A great number of these Civil War CDVs were taken by Mathew Brady. That said, cartes-de-visite were also popular among 19th-century notables, from Abraham Lincoln and Bret Harte to Queen Victoria and Napoleon III. But the popularity of the CDV would be eclipsed in the 1870s with the rise of cabinet cards, which were twice the size of CDVs.