Ressemblance et identité: Théophile Silvestre et l’art du portrait d’après nature

Judging that a sufficient number of “legends” had been published on the great painter of the past, Théophile Silvestre gave himself, as early as 1853, an ambitious project : that of writing a history of “living artists” whose photographic portrait he commissions and then complements with a literary portrait drawn “from nature”. Silvestre’s project, at the intersection of art criticism, literature, and journalism, stands out for the radicalism of its tone and its decision to recount, with “as much faithfulness as independence”, the personalities of painters. This paper tries to account for the way the sincerity that characterises his approach is elaborated through the practice of trenchant irony supposed to mirror the “toughness” and “rigour” of the photographic image. Such a project cannot be realised without some contradictions and even paradoxes.