Photography by other means? The engravings of Ferdinand Gaillard

Ferdinand Gaillard (1834-1887) was acclaimed as the last major practitioner in France of the reproductive engraving. Although he used the traditional burin, his techniques presented a challenge to his contemporaries. His versions of paintings by Bellini, Ingres, and van Eyck were noted for their historicist flavor, appropriate to the taste of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, where they were published. His rendering of sculptures by Donatello and his late portraits after his own drawings invited direct comparison with photographic methods of reproduction then being developed. Yet this connection should be measured against a self-consciousness in his working procedures characteristic of modernism.