Abstract
This article follows the chance discovery of a ‘souvenir’ commemorating the death of the wife of the painter Paul Delaroche in 1845. It consists of an engraving of that date by Alphonse François, after Delaroche’s drawing of Louise in the form of a medallion (1843). It was dedicated to a close family friend, Héracle Fréteau de Pény, who included other mementoes of her life, including a lock of her hair, in the framed souvenir when he had put it together in 1851. Dating from the decade in which photography established itself in France, this object enacts a form of commemoration that owes nothing to the photographic image, and yet it multiplies the signs of indexicality in addition to its iconic and symbolic reference. It is argued that such a complex collection of signs, which illuminates social and cultural practices in the process of framing the original print, may provide a paradigm for asking new questions about the status of the visual print in this period and art–historical procedures more generally.
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