In May 2025, I came across an extraordinary photograph on the English Wikipedia site devoted to Jeanne Duval. Duval was the supposedly un-photographed Haiti-born long-term mistress and muse of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.
The portrait, showing a seated woman dressed in fine, bourgeois clothing, had been posted to Wikipedia by a student of art historian Justine de Young. De Young writes about the portrait as an example of self-fashioning in her recent book, The Art of Parisian Chic.
Printed on a small carte de visite (a photographic visiting card) and bearing the date August 18 1862, the image had been discovered in the French archives by a different researcher, as mentioned in my recent TLS article, and documented online by her in 2021.
