Ferdinand BERILLON : Portrait photographique de Rodolphe Bresdin
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Ferdinand BERILLON (active between 1863 and 1890) : Photographic Portrait of Rodolphe Bresdin - 1866 or1867
Only known proof of the only known photographic portrait of Rodolphe Bresdin.
Lifetime proof on albumen paper (96 x 60 mm) pasted on a business card (105 x 62 mm). Initials F. B. printed on the left in the blank part below the photograph. On the reverse side of the card are the addresses of Berillon's studio in Bayonne and his branch in Biarritz.
Annotation in violet ink on verso: Rodolphe Bresdin graveur.
Until now, the name of the photographer who produced this portrait of Bresdin, of which no proof was known, was unknown. However, the portrait was not unknown. Robert de Montesquiou had described it in his essay on Bresdin:
"I have before me two portraits of Bresdin, in better times: one, a print by Monsieur Aglaüs Bouvenne, shows a reclusive head with a bushy beard and a Socratic skull, quite similar to the Verlaine of his later years. The other, much preferable, is a photograph of the good man, sitting cross-legged, in a familiar attitude under his heavy cloth paletot, his checked pants, his pipette in his hand, his head debonair and wilful, peasant and fine." (Robert de Montesquiou, L'inextricable graveur: Rodolphe Bresdin, H. Floury 1913, p. 47, translated by us).
In his monograph on Bresdin accompanying the catalogue raisonné of his engraved works, Dirk Van Gelder presents a poor reproduction of this photograph, with the bottom cut off and the background decoration erased:
"To try to picture Bresdin, we have only one photograph (fig. I0). Let's imagine him rising from his seat. He is, as Redon tells us, "a man of medium height, stocky and powerful, with short arms". A middle-aged man, in his forties. "Young still, but already aged", Cladel had said a few years earlier. We also have a drawing of Bresdin (fig. 132). Executed by Condeixa, his son-in-law, it gives us a peaceful image of the artist's old age, especially when we consider the sixty-year-old Bresdin as described by Alexandre Hepp: "A head to frighten, the eyes extinguished, the torso broken". Photography and drawing are the only two authentic portraits we have found, and it's hard to get an idea of the younger Bresdin." (Van Gelder, Rodolphe Bresdin, Vol. I. Monographie en trois parties, 1976, p. 39, translated by us).
Inspired by this photograph, says Van Gelder, Ernest Bouvenne produced the etching for the frontispiece of his Catalogue des pièces gravées de Rodolphe Bresdin (op. cit. p. 160).
In the catalog for the exhibition Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) : Robinson graveur at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (May 30 - August 2, 2000), Maxime Préaud quotes Robert de Montesquiou's text and says that he only knows the photograph from reproductions by Neumann (1929) and Van Gelder:
"We haven't managed to get our hands on an original proof. It is perfectly described by Montesquiou. It served as a model for a lithograph executed as a counterpart by Auguste André Lançon (1836-1885), exhibited and reproduced as a work by Alphonse Legros at the Chicago exhibition of 1931(...) Where this photograph comes from, it is rather difficult to say with certainty. Bresdin's relationship with photography deserves a little study. Van Gelder thinks that this photograph was taken in the 1860s, when Bresdin was in Bordeaux, which is quite likely.” (p. 32 – our translation)
However, this is not the case. The unobtainable proof we were lucky enough to acquire tells us that this portrait was taken by the photographer Ferdinand Berillon, based in Bayonne and Biarritz. The photograph was most probably taken in Biarritz, where Bresdin stayed several times: once as a guest of his friend Capin, again in October 1866, and again "with unknown friends" in autumn 1867 (Van Gelder, Monographie pp. 19, 62, 95).
Bresdin's presence in Biarritz in 1866 is attested by the dedication on an impression of The Good Samaritan: “témoignage de bon souvenir /pour votre bonne hospitalité / Biarritz 5 octobre 1866”.
It is possible that Bresdin, whose means were very modest, ordered only a very small number of proofs of his portrait from Berillon, or that he was even content with this single proof, not following up on the photographer's offer at the bottom of the verso: "All plates are kept. Anyone wishing to obtain further proofs need only quote the plate number". (There is no number on the reverse of our proof). This would explain why the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the INHA have no proof to date, and why neither Van Gelder nor Maxime Préaud have been able to locate any.