The ‘Autographic Self’: Facsimile Signatures and Lithographic Portraiture at the Crossroads of Liberalism, Romanticism and Nationalism, c. 1800–60

Abstract

This article traces the cultural history of a portrait format popularised through the global expansion of lithographic printing. This format combined a traditional portrait vignette with a lithographic facsimile of the sitter’s signature. Such ‘facsimile-autographed’ portraits evoked the notion that sitters had physically signed their own likenesses – testifying not only to the veracity of the depiction, but displaying an indexical trace of embodied agency. The article argues that this format afforded a particularly cogent way to conceptualise and communicate ideas about selfhood and society in liberal, romantic, and nationalist political programmes. Such lithographic portraits did not simply ‘encode’ or ‘reflect’ these new ideas, however, but were part of a technological revolution that decentralised the production of mass media and thereby reshaped the societies in which such novel ideas flourished. By connecting the various expressions of public selfhood found in facsimile-autographed portraits to the way lithography expanded audiences and reshaped modes of conceptualising public and private life over the course of the nineteenth century, this article argues that established scholarly concepts like the ‘romantic self’ or ‘liberal self’ might be reconsidered through a new, technomaterial heuristic: the ‘lithographic self’.