Monsignor Dupanloup
(1802-1878)

Monsignor Félix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup, was Bishop of Orléans from 1849 and one of the foremost educationalists in France. He exerted strong pressure on public policy, especially in education, and was active in securing for the Church the right to conduct voluntary schools. Later he was a strong advocate of the Pope's claims against the House of Savoy. At the First Vatican Council (1870) he strongly advised the minority, of whom he was one, to abstain from voting and to withdraw, but he loyally accepted the decisions of the Council when promulgated.

This portrait of the bishop was taken en plein air and shows Monsignor Dupanloup seated on a lawn in front of an ivy-clad wall and the louvred shutter of a French window.

The image appears as an illustration in A.A.E.Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph by Elizabeth Anne McCauley, who writes that the photographer was probably a member of Disdéri's staff. However, another carte in my collection shows the monsignor on the same occasion (the ivy and the louvred shutter are visible in the background of both photographs), surrounded by some twenty-six members of the teaching staff of the seminary of la Chapelle de St Mesmin. The arrangement of such a large group of sitters is not something that Disdéri could have entrusted to an assistant, and in fact, the careful composition of the group portrait reveals the hand of the master.