Portrait photograph.
Ca. 38 x 30 cm. Silver gelatin print.
$3,908.00
Uncommonly large print of one of the four photos of Marx that the London photographer John Mayall jr. (1842-91) made in rapid sequence.
Mayall was the son of the photographic pioneer John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1813-1901), who in 1860 took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria. The renowned Mayall studio had produced a fine portrait of Marx as early as 1872 (it was used as a frontispiece in the first livraison of the first French edition of "Das Kapital"). The four 1875 Mayall portraits went on to become Marx's most widely disseminated likeness: after his friend's death in 1883, Engels ordered 1200 prints to send to socialists all over the world, deciding that this was "the final, the best picture, showing Mohr [his nickname for Marx] in all his serene, confident, Olympian calmness".
The original knee-length image is here enlarged and cropped to show Marx's left arm (his hand resting in his lap) along the lower edge. Two corners bent and creased; some nicks and edge flaws; slightly yellowed. Apparently a reproduction, or perhaps a poorly focused test print, probably produced ca. 1900-1910. Provenance: Paul Longuet (1909-79), French politician and great-grandson of Karl Marx: the son of the socialist Edgar Longuet, whose parents were the Proudhonist Charles Longuet and Marx's eldest daughter, Jenny Caroline.
Cf. IISG call no. BG A 9/363.