[Alphonse Poitevin and his Wife, Sophie Poitevin]

Although not necessarily made as a pair, these two portraits wittily reference each other. The photographer Alphonse Poitevin, a chemical engineer by training, looks directly into the camera while pouring the contents of one beaker into another on the table in front of him, as if interrupted from an important experiment. In the second portrait, his wife, Sophie, is also caught in a seemingly private moment, looking up as she stirs a concoction on a table set with elegant drinkware. Each spouse is the ruler of their respective domain, brought together in miniature by a process perfected by Poitevin that allowed carbon photographs to be transferred onto enamel surfaces.

Poitevin licensed the process to more than thirty photographers between 1860 and 1868, demonstrating it personally to many of them with the help of a former enamel painter, Lucien Choquet. While both these portraits were presumably made by Poitevin, it is difficult to know with certainty because he often used the work of other photographers in his practice.