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Etching by Nicolas-François Chifflart

This distinctive, almost fearsome rendering of Poe (fig. 47) is the work of Nicolas-François Chifflart, a French painter and engraver born in Saint-Omer, near Calais, in 1825. Chifflart, described as a brilliant but highly temperamental artist, was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and in 1845 made his debut at the Paris Salon. In 1850 he won third place in the prestigious Prix de Rome competition, and a year later carried away first prize with his canvas Périclès au Lit de Sons Fils. In later years he worked in a variety of media, including watercolor, oil, and lithography, and in 1882 he executed a series of illustrations for Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer. Despite his youthful promise, Chifflart's querulous nature is said to have prevented him from attaining any real measure of success, and he was forced to support himself primarily as an illustrator. He died in Paris, in extreme poverty, in 1901.(80)

Chifflart's etching of Poe bears little resemblance to the established portraits of the poet, and is perhaps best categorized as an imaginary likeness. It was first published in France, in volume one of Charles Baudelaire's translation of Poe's tales, Histoires Extraordinaires, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Quantin, 1884); there it accompanied Baudelaire's essay “Edgar Poe: Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres.” The likeness is an oval bust portrait, beneath which is inscribed the word “Eureka” — a reference to Poe's 1848 cosmological treatise Eureka: A Prose Poem. The etching is signed in the plate at the lower right: “F. Chifflart, inv. pinx. sculpxit” (created, painted, and etched by F. Chifflart). This inscription implies that Chifflart either based his work on a preliminary painting of some sort or, more probably, that he issued a number of hand-colored copies of the etching used in the Quantin edition of the Histoires Extraordinaires. The etching was reprinted in the United States as “a new etched portrait” in volume six of The Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, with Biographical Essay by John H. Ingram, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: George Barrie & Son, n.d.), published about 1895.(81) A photographic reproduction of the etching was published as “A Europeanized Poe” in the May 1897 issue of The Bookman, and in October 1903 a heavily rendered derivative likeness appeared in the Booklovers Magazine, accompanying an essay entitled “The Dual Personality in Literature and Life.”