Alexandre Dumas, père, from Galerie Contemporaine,

ca. 1862, printed 1878

Alexandre Dumas, père (1802–1870), was a French novelist and playwright, best known for The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845). The grandson of a French nobleman and an African-Caribbean slave, Dumas faced racial discrimination but also benefited from his aristocratic status. At the age of twenty-seven he wrote the first Romantic play, Henry III and His Court, and was portrayed in a medallion by David d’Angers, on view in a case in this gallery. While David portrays Dumas as an idealistic young man, in this photograph Carjat deftly captures the slightly pompous grandeur of Dumas as a venerated literary elder and celebrated figure in avant-garde Paris. Alexandre Dumas, fils, his son by one of his mistresses and a friend of Manet, described this milieu in his play, La Dame aux Camélias (1848), which inspired Giuseppe Verdi’s opera
La Traviata (1853).